06.01.2025
Reflection at the Beginning 2025 by Archbishop Michael Jackson
“A fruitfully functioning society in 2025 will look first and last to provision for the vulnerable.”
Change is what a new year is about. The old year fades from our consciousness. The new timeframe and the new vista take its place. The shift is from certainty to uncertainty, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the past to the future. The old year should not hold us too long in the grip of sentimentality because what is new is also our friend, our new friend. Change embraces us forward, so to speak. It takes our hand, it puts its arm around us. By our naming it, it helps us to get going in this uncertain, unfamiliar future which will rapidly become the present. And, perhaps, it is in our powerlessness to prevent change that we will find our greatest freedom of all. Control is often our strongest temptation – whether it be sheer stubbornness, personal coercion of others, international warfare or merely not wanting to let go of what must pass on.
One national image that should not fade from our consciousness, however, is the near–spectral, yet entirely real, pictures of people queuing as darkness falls for supermarket vouchers outside the Capuchin Day Centre in Dublin’s Smithfield as an early and a cold night envelops them. The sickly yellow glow of the street lights in the photograph adds to the tragic alarm of the human scene. People like us are anxiously waiting to see if, once again, everything will run out and they will have to come back again tomorrow. Samuel Beckett captured it so well: Perhaps Mr Godot will come tomorrow … As in the days of the baby Jesus, there is no room in the inn. This sort of image we tend to associate with parts of the Middle East and South Sudan. The fact that it is within a few metres of a Luas Stop in a major city and one that is in daily use brings it right home to us that poverty and subsistence, hunger and homelessness, are not solely ‘out there’ but are also ‘in here’. This will continue to be the Ireland of 2025, come what may. The failure to provide stable housing, secure food, accessible physical and mental healthcare affects not only living standards but living capacity right across the country. It remains an ebb tide that has become a Force 9 gale.
Change and hope work together. They need one another. Any of us who care for other people or who rely on the care of other people know that hopelessness drags us downwards in an ever–tightening spiral of worthlessness. Material loss is one thing. The cracking and the crumbling of personal dignity is quite another. If the change which a new year ushers in does anything, then it sheds a light which makes everything clearer and sharper. In so doing it challenges a failure to act for others who have unimaginable needs as something which dare not become neglected once more as one year morphs into another. We ask those who bring both fresh and seasoned political eyes on the plight of individuals and communities in Ireland to keep trying, to keep listening and to act quickly. Not only does this relate to food. It also relates to housing and healthcare, to education and ecology, to protection and opportunity. A fruitfully functioning society in 2025 will look first and last to provision for the vulnerable.
The Christian Scriptures remind us that hope is in things not seen. This is difficult for a contemporary generation to grasp not least because we have little understanding of the distinction between hope and optimism. Hope is not for the best. Hope is for the adventure of change. Hope belongs to us all. While we can change a certain amount ourselves, those with greater power and capacity to do so need to grasp the hope that offers the chances to make a difference on behalf of people other than themselves and to build these chances into the tapestry of our society. It is a matter of government much more than it is a matter of politics. People are entitled to expect it as a new government makes its way towards formation and service of everyone beyond the electioneering, the haggling and the compromises.
An African woman shared the story of The Good Samaritan making his perilous way by road from Jerusalem to Jericho with the women in the market in her city. The men to whom she had talked were wondering who today were the Priest and the Levite. But the women simply said: Why isn’t anyone doing anything about the road? The whole system, they were suggesting, needed an overhaul. Perhaps 2025 will be the year when we all ask more and more hopeful questions about the road itself. I wish you a Happy and Hopeful New Year.
+Michael Jackson
Dublin and Glendalough