Beginning the New Year with Hope

by Patrice Fagnant-MacArthur

Are you approaching the New Year with hope? Somehow the turning of the calendar page causes us all to reflect a bit more on where our journey through this life is taking us. We may rejoice that the year is ending, particularly if it was an unusually difficult one, or we may feel some sadness at the passage of time. Here we are, another year older. Have we made the most of that year? What do we have to show for another trip around the sun? Perhaps more importantly, what are we looking for in the coming year?

It has been said that hope is what makes us human and keeps us alive. Each of us who finds the courage to face another day has hope. What do we hope in? Pope Benedict XVI recently released his second encyclical, Spe Salvi - On Christian Hope. Faith and Hope are intimately connected. "We see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness." (SS 2) Isn't that what we are all looking for - an assurance that our lives mean something, that we matter? We yearn for meaning and purpose. We are all familiar with emptiness, with loneliness, with feeling that our efforts are all in vain. We get brief glimpses in which all seems right with the world, when we are in the "zone," and we savor them, but all too quickly those moments fade. Yet, that is what we yearn for - "true life, untouched even by death." We do not truly know "this thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience and accomplish is not what we yearn for." (SS 12) The reality exists beyond our understanding, yet that is what we hope for.

Perhaps the time in which we feel most hopeful is when we first fall in love. I had a wonderful elderly Rabbi as a professor in Hebrew Scriptures when I was in college. He told us that a person's wedding day was the most hopeful day of their lives. A couple takes a blind leap into the future, hoping and believing in the good things to come. They believe there is nothing that their love can't conquer. Thank goodness couples begin marriage with hope! It is a hard journey and that hope will help sustain them. It is when that hope is lost that marriages break down. As Pope Benedict XVI states, however, even the strongest of human loves can be destroyed by death. Divine love is the only love that is constant, the only love that we can fully hope and trust in. Through prayer we can connect with that hope. "When no one listens to me any more, God still listens to me." (SS 32)

Hope is not purely individual. It is also communal. "Being in communion with Jesus Christ draws us into his 'being for all'; . . .He commits us to live for others. . . Hope in a Christian sense is always hope for others as well." (SS 28, 34) We do need the hopes that fill our days - hopes for our lives, hopes for our children, hopes for our careers, for better health, for peace. "But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God." (SS 31)

As we begin this New Year and take stock of our lives, it is important to remember the reason for our hope. We yearn for God and that which lies beyond that which we see in this world. Pope Benedict XVI tells us "the one who has hope lives differently." (SS 2) May our lives this coming year reflect that Hope.

Patrice Fagnant-MacArthur is editor of Spiritual Woman. Visit her blog at http://spiritualwomanthoughts.blogspot.com
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