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FATHER PETER'S JANUARY MESSAGE
A NEW YEAR MESSAGE
Dear People of St. Peter’s Parish,
The letter for the New Year edition of Church News has to be written a fortnight before publication. Today is the Saturday before ‘Gaudete’ (or ‘Rejoice’) Sunday.
We are more than halfway through Advent, the Church’s period of waiting & preparation for the festival of Jesus’ birth. Christmas is now drawing close, so the opening words of tomorrow’s service invite us to be happy, to ‘Rejoice…’
Is there really much to rejoice about this year, you may ask. Things seem to be falling apart around us, with little but signs of break up wherever you look. On our doorstep the Eurozone is on the brink of collapse. Some politicians & commentators think this would be a good thing and is probably inevitable. But everyone who understands these things agrees that the consequences for us (even though we’ve chosen to keep our own currency) would be cataclysmic: a wholesale collapse of banks & businesses, mass unemployment and social chaos. (We know we lack our parents’ & grandparents’ capacity for self-restraint!) Our leaders are unable to agree about how to respond to the crisis…or to compromise. Meanwhile, Europe slips closer to the edge!
Further afield protest – ‘uprisings’ to those in power – lock peoples & governments in conflicts where neither side can win , or is ready to surrender. In Afghanistan there is stalemate; and for reasons of ‘principle’ (or ideology) interested parties are unwilling to take the sort of new initiatives that might bring relief or improvement. In society there is if not a breakdown of law & order certainly of shared common valued to which you can appeal knowing that there will be a response.
As 2012 begins, what is there to rejoice about?
Sometimes there has to be a breaking of moulds for new things to come into being. Perhaps we needed a financial crisis to prod us in Britain to restructuring our lending & welfare arrangements…and realigning our expectation of the state and of ourselves. It may be that only the rise of the economies of Asia and the revolutions in the Arab world – for all the dangers & uncertainties they create – can provoke real reassessment of Western policy in the Middle East and new approaches to aid and trading arrangements with poorer regions.
We may have to accept limitations on our freedom to please ourselves (‘live our dreams’), which we have come to see as something we deserve – and that, presumably, the poor of the world (‘the wretched of the earth’) do not deserve. Would this be such a disaster –knowing that we are cushioned (so many are not!) by a safety net that will protect us from the very worst?
Perhaps we may have something to gain from sharing the restraint on our freedom – the need to establish priorities and to renounce what we cannot afford – that is the lot of the majority of our fellow human beings.
Could we welcome temporary austerity as what religious people of all faiths call a fast – an experience from which we can learn gratitude for what we do have and compassion for those whose sufferings dwarf our own?
We hope for the best in 2012 – and the courage to live creatively with what we would not have chosen but cannot change.
Wishing you every blessing,
Fr. Peter