In the Bible the idea of jubilee is described as the Sabbath of Sabbaths. In a jubilee year, the land was allowed to lie fallow, all debts were to be forgiven, captives were to be set free and a celebration was to be held. As we proclaim the jubilee year 2000, we are challenged to live a jubilee in our time - to forgive, to celebrate and to hope, as the people did in biblical times.
Hope is our deepest need as we face into the new century and the new millennium. When we consider the state of the world - peoples torn apart by war and genocide, children abandoned, orphaned, neglected, abused and starving, disease decimating Africa, genetic manipulation of the very structures of life about to confront us with appalling questions, and natural disaster piled on natural disaster in many parts of the world, people and houses swept away by floods and mudslides, cities rocked and wrecked by earthquakes - when we consider all this, it is hard to hope.
Sometimes, we don't even need to think about the catastrophes that occur in other places, to other people. It is enough to contemplate our local problems - poverty, homelessness, disempowerment, marginalisation, abuse, corruption, political ineptitude, moral emptiness - and our own private losses and griefs - separation, illness, death, feeling hard done-by, feeling misunderstood, feeling a failure, feeling weak and inadequate.
Everywhere, there are reasons not to hope. It is much easier to abandon hope than to live it. Yet hope is our sacred duty at this time, for without hope we are trapped in our own despair, stymied by our own inadequacy, sapped of the will to fight to make a better world for the children. Hope is not a logical virtue. If we were to live by logic, we would have abandoned hope long ago; during the Famine, maybe; or during the long decades and centuries of emigration and the forcible splitting up of families; or during the hard coming to birth of this nation and the tough early decades of the State; or during the dark years of violent sectarian conflict on this island.
But we would have been wrong not to hope through those times, as our current economic buoyancy and international success and the stumbling beginnings of peace in our country have shown; and we would be wrong not to continue to hope, in spite of everything, into this new era that is just beginning.
Hope is a mystical virtue. If we look for human solutions to our problems, we will soon fall into despair, for problems such as abuse, torture, oppression, racism, hatred, corruption and war are not amenable to merely human solutions. That is why, as Christians, we are called to hope. We are called to probe the forbidden, to unmask monsters, to look death in the eye and to live in love's inimitable way. With hope goes the jubilee virtue of forgiveness. Our freedom as human beings is grounded in forgiveness. Forgiveness liberates us. And it works both ways, for we are all both wounder and wounded, oppressor and oppressed, sinned against and sinning. Being forgiven liberates us, and forgiving also liberates us. Forgiveness allows us to understand our own wretchedness and to accept our failures. Together, forgiveness, understanding and acceptance lead us into celebration - of ourselves, of each other, of humanity, and of jubilee.
It is interesting and helpful to us today to reflect on what jubilee meant to the people of Israel in biblical times. But it is important that we should live this jubilee year in our own time. That means that we should review and renew our habits, our ways of thinking and acting, in the light of an acute awareness of the impact - social, political, economic, moral and spiritual - that our actions have on those around us, on society and on our institutions of State and faith.
We are all responsible for the world we live in. We hold that responsibility jointly, and we hold it now. Now is our time to take responsibility, in joy and hope and celebration and with forgiveness in our hearts, for ourselves, for our families and loved ones, for our communities, for our environment, for our towns and cities and nations and states, for our children, for our political and social and religious institutions, for our past, our present and our future.
The world is ours while we live in it, and ours to pass on to our children. It is our mother Earth and the source of our life, and it is our responsibility to look after it. It is up to us to create it every day anew, especially in this jubilee year, as we live out our lives in Christian joy and millennial hope.
Sister Stanislaus Kennedy is president of Focus Ireland