As a new year begins, Daniel O’Leary reminds us that we have a beautiful story to share as a blessing for those who feel overwhelmed by anxiety.

January is a month for courageous beginnings. Yet, so many of us are starting the new year with less conviction than usual. This is an extraordinary moment in our history. Fragmentation and confusion are casting heavy shadows over our lives. Populist power is a growing phenomenon in a radically changing world – so fragile and wounded by the nightmares of terrorism, political upheaval and global warming. The challenges that we face are huge indeed. The journey to a healing wholeness will be slow and complicated. Our hearts are apprehensive. We need courage to hope.

This new year is surely a challenge for the human soul, a time when we try again to believe in a deeper, more harmonious way of living our lives on this earth. Beyond retreating into a naïve spirituality of wishful thinking, we search for a vision and a language that give hope to a perplexed and threatened society. There is no denying the spreading anxiety, the sense of a growing menace, of a lost order. In a pre-Christmas statement about this deep-seated concern, a multi-racial group of Christian scholars, including Richard Rohr, wrote that it challenges us at a core, religious level: “This is no longer governance as usual but a moral and theological crisis.”

Is this the time to reach for our true traditions, to remember the stories we grew up with, to rekindle in our world the powerful fire of faith? Hope or despair can spring from the stories we choose to tell. Stories can be told that pander to the weakness in us, or we can reach for stories that will empower us to imagine and create a better world. And we have already, of course, if we listen to it, a story of reconciliation and redemption that touches each of us personally and universally. In 1986, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote about “awakening the memories and stories of our goodness and beauty so as to open the doors of hope”.