New Year’s can be a hectic time of the season. There is always a lot of frantic celebrating that is as often as not done out of a sense of duty than out of any real feeling of expectant joy at the prospect of a new year.

But really, celebration is appropriate for New Year’s. New beginnings are always kind of joyful things.

So, there is a certain freshness to the day, a readiness to believe we are not in fact, slaves to the past, that we can renew our lives, refresh our efforts to make of ourselves the kind of people we want to be, that we know we should be.

It seems to me that not only is it part of human nature but also it seems to be part of divine nature as well. This eagerness to grow, to perfect ourselves and our world, is a grace. It is a gift, the gift of hope. New Year’s Day really a celebration of hope. And what a profoundly Christian virtue hope is. It is Christ who gives sustenance to our hope. It is our faith in the fact that God has united himself to our human efforts, so that all the barriers, all of the limits to what human beings can make of themselves, have been removed, that is what makes our hope something more than idle dreaming. We are absolutely justified, because of Christ, in hoping for the best from the New Year, the best from ourselves in the New Year. We are justified in hoping for peace in a war-torn world, for charity in a world that tolerates and, in many ways, even seems to encourage the victimisation of the weak and the poor.

Perhaps that is really the best understanding of the virtue of hope, a willingness to suspend our critical judgement of the world, a willingness to judge the goodness of the world and of people not so much on the basis of what seems to be true to our senses but rather on the basis of what we know to be true in our hearts and minds. Hope springs from a willingness to judge the world as God judges it. Certainly, that was the insight of the shepherds and Maji at Bethlehem, the insight even of Joseph and Mary themselves. Their surroundings, the evidence of their senses, would not lead them to expect much more from that event. But their faith led them to expect a great deal. And they did. The Birth of Christ became for them a font of great hope, a hope that was fulfilled.

Fr Andrew