The start of a new year provides a special opportunity to reflect on the lessons of past year, but it is also a time to look ahead, to plan, to resolve anew. Every life is meant for growth.

As citizens of Trinidad and Tobago consider the prospects for 2008, they dare not do so without hope, without some anticipation of positive change.

Hope, so closely connected to faith, is expressed through witnesses – men and women of hope. All are called to that hope. Persons who have lived exemplary lives inspire hope; those who seek to live good lives now cause us to hope.

Early in his second encyclical Spe Salvi which treats of hope, Pope Benedict XVI takes some time recounting the life of the Sudanese nun Josephine Bakhita (1869 – 1947) canonised by Pope John Paul II in 2000.

Kidnapped and taken into slavery at about age nine, she experienced the sufferings and humiliations of slavery – in both physical and moral ways. At the end of her ordeal she was left with 144 scars on her body, the result of frequent floggings.

When in 1882 she was sold to the Italian consul and brought to Italy she came to know a Master, above all masters – the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. In the words of the Pope, she came to know “she was known and loved and she was awaited.

What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her ‘at the Father's right hand’. Now she had ‘hope’ —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: ‘I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.’”

In time Bakhita was baptised, made her First Holy Communion and became a member of the Congregation of Canossian Sisters. She spent the rest of her life sharing the reason for her hope – in everyday situations as well as on several missions around Italy.  

Bakhita’s story illustrates that the hope we need to attain true life arises from an encounter with the living God and that all of us are called to be missionaries of hope. The hope that Christ brings urges us on bring hope to others.

A Church in dialogue

A distinguishing mark of Christians, says Pope Benedict is that “they have a future … they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness …Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well”.

This hope, therefore, has to be expressed in and through the activity of our Church in particular ways.

In 2008, the local Church will assemble under the leadership of Archbishop Edward Gilbert for another sitting of Synod, opening the Church to a dialogue about its present and future, as it did in 2003 and 2005, but doing so on the momentum and promise of the earlier sittings.

The success of the 2008 Synod, critical for the future of the Church, will depend on the hope its members bring to the deliberations.
The Church begins each New Year with the celebration of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.

Mary is also Mother of the Church, making possible – in a unique way – an encounter of her children with her only-begotten Son. At the end of Spe Salvi the Pope honours Mary as “Star of Hope”.

He notes that Jesus Christ “is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the shadows of history”, but to reach him we need other lights close by. Who better than Mary, he asks, “could be a star of hope for us? With her ‘yes’ she opened the door of our world to God himself”.

May our Blessed Mother stay close to each of us and her Church in 2008.