We start with hope

New beginnings. A fresh start. It appeals to our deeper selves, giving ourselves permission to move on, to accept that our previous journey has been completed. A new start brings optimism, it stirs our capacity for resilience. But most of all a new beginning gives hope.

And hope is what a new year is. It is the anticipation of what is to come, what may be, what can be desired and dreamed.

Jurgen Moltmann, a German prisoner of war, who amidst the enormous suffering caused by his people, became a Christian after being given a copy of the New Testament by an American chaplain. As his story is told, Moltmann could at last see the glimmer, the possibility, of a future for his own generation of lost souls. In time he expressed his reflections in The theology of hope. For the end times are the consummation of creation itself. For the Christian, hope is driven towards that moment when all is made anew in Christ. For Moltmann hopelessness is sin.

Paul, some 20 centuries ago, also expressed in his rather rugged and forthright way what lies at the core of Christian hope and expectation:

For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished. If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people. But Christ has in fact been raised from the dead, the first fruits of all who have fallen asleep.

1 Corinthians 15:16 – 20

If what we believe, as many would argue, is just simply fiction, a panacea for the ills of the present, then what Christians have proposed for 2000 years is an utter fabrication. The only hope then would be for ‘world peace’, for an end to world hunger, tyranny, war. This then is why Christian faith guarantees not just a perspective, but a fundamental option for human hope and aspiration.

You have expressed that faith presenting your children as students of this Catholic School, you have baptised them, raised them in loving and nurturing families and you have dreamed dreams for them, given them hope. 2010 is not only a new year, it is a chance for a new life.

I look forward to sharing this new year, our Christian hope, our shared faith with you and your families.