Hope is Enough

Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. —Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Greene makes his statement about a starving dog with a broken back or broken legs that drags herself to the door of a house, where she whines, howls, and moves her tail, just in case the building is not truly abandoned and whoever could be in it might have food to offer. It is a difficult scene in a book filled with them, but hope wends its way through the pages. While there actually isn’t much for the dog, hope does exist for each of the human characters, even though so many of them seem bound and determined to louse it all up.

Greene’s novel is set in Mexico at a time (only about a hundred years ago) when religion was outlawed. The book was harder to read this time around, when each day of the past two years has brought to light near continual assaults on freedom, whether it is a bureaucracy mandating vaccines and masks, a federal agency investigating parents for objecting to what public schools are shoving down the throats of their children, police officers arresting pastors for holding church services, or a Canadian prime minister confiscating the bank accounts of citizens who disagree with his policies.

Through it all, though, hope never quite dies, even if it seems like all that’s left amounts to little more than the tiny flower seeds I scattered in the backyard today.