New year, new life!

2013 has arrived. Another year in the countdown of human history. Another year of our personal, family and social history. Another year of life and with it a new opportunity to evaluate, refresh, project, and begin anew.

Many are the challenges that we meet and that require the best from each of us and from all of humanity to find solutions, to convert this time and space into “a new heaven and a new earth”.

The armed conflicts, the wars between nations and with internal guerrillas, the economic worries and the great gaps between persons and peoples which are experienced by all and especially by the large numbers that have nothing, the social injustice with a thousand causes and manifestations, the inequality of opportunity of access to social benefits, discrimination in so many aspects of social life, frontiers, migratory movements, the global economic crisis, administrative corruption in government and in public and private business, evasion seen in the youth (drugs, sex, fame, etc.), the waste of the few as an affront to the misery of the many, consumerism and materialism that smother and block out a transcendent vision of life, the senselessness of a hedonistic and pansexual perspective on life, the loss of value of human life, the primacy of having instead of being, and of material things over persons, the primacy of technique over ethics and moral values, the search for power at any cost to oppress rather than to serve, the privilege of production and the accumulation of riches and of capital rather than the search for a shared world economy that is more human, just, equitable and fraternal, the permanent damage to nature and the planet, etc… all are global problems that challenge us, that ask of all human beings and of those who call ourselves Christians, to provide ready answers that are adequate and reasonable.

As Christians we have plenty of reasons to celebrate the beginning of another year as a unique opportunity to make of the world and of our historical moment the space and time in which the kingdom of God might take place.

The kingdom of God occurs when we lay aside our personal choices and interests to give place to the will of God which —as lived and taught by Jesus— consists of “loving one another”. This is the kingdom of God that is possible when we see ourselves as brothers, children of the same Father.

A popular refrain states: “new year: new life”. This should be our standard, our purpose, and that of all: building new lives, new interpersonal relationships and with peoples and nations, for the building of “new” institutions in “new” societies.

May the happiness with the best desires that we offer to others these days serve to commit us to the building of a true, profound and radically new year at the personal family and social level. HAVE A HAPPY AND BLESSED NEW YEAR IN 2013!