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Dear Mount Community,
Happy New Year! Welcome to a new academic year. Whether you are just beginning your journey here or returning after the summer break, today we stand at a threshold—a starting point. And as we step forward together into this year, we do so under the light of a powerful and beautiful theme: Pilgrims of Hope: Together as One. More than just a feeling, hope is a posture, a disposition, a choice, a way of walking through the world. It’s a theological virtue or like faith and love.
Sometimes hope has been called the forgotten virtue of our time. The problem is not that we hope for too much, but that we have learned to settle for so little. Our horizons of hope have shrunk. We have lost sight of hope’s transcendent dimension because we have forgotten the incomparable promise to which hope always beckons.
This year, across the global Church, we are celebrating a Jubilee Year of Hope. It seems appropriate that we embrace this new year together, as pilgrims on this journey. Jubilees are special years: moments to pause, to reflect, and to begin again with joy. This new academic year is an opportunity for renewal, for remembering what really matters, and for looking ahead with courage. We do so as a community, together and with confidence in a God who calls us, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:11) And so, we take up the invitation to be pilgrims of hope this year.
Not tourists. Not spectators. Pilgrims.
A pilgrim is someone who travels with purpose—someone who knows they are on a journey that will shape them. Pilgrims aren’t just on a long walk, they’re on a mission. Along the way, the road may be uneven. The path may twist and turn. We might not always see the destination clearly. But still, we walk on, with hope as our compass. Pilgrims are not complacent! Like St. Ignatius, pilgrims are called and on the move. Now that we have our own labyrinth to walk, we can respond to the call as a pilgrim. The labyrinth reminds us that we are called to action. Walk this path that takes you to your center and sends you back out to the world in service. Allow the labyrinth to be a way to quiet the mind, calm anxieties, recover balance in life, enhance creativity and encourage meditation, insight, self-reflection and stress reduction.
Our life path can be viewed as a labyrinth guiding us to deeper meaning and fulfillment. Walking it takes us through numerous twists and turns that symbolize the ebb and flow of life. Take note that like the design in the labyrinth, what looks like an end point in life can also be a beginning point.
The kind of hope I’m talking about is not shallow or easy. It is not the hope that wishes everything were perfect. It is the deeper kind—the kind that chooses to believe that even small beginnings matter. The kind that sees the seed in the soil and already imagines the harvest.
This is captured so beautifully in our school motto:
Spes messis in semine – The hope of the harvest is in the seed.
Each one of us is carrying seeds—of talent, of kindness, of curiosity, of courage, of leadership. What you plant this year, in your learning, in your relationships, in your choices—will shape not only your own growth, but the life of this whole community.
When writing about hope, St. Thomas Aquinas noted that hope is born from the desire for something good that is “difficult but possible to attain.” There is no need for hope if we can easily get what we want, but neither is there any reason to hope when what we desire is completely beyond our grasp. But Aquinas also observed that there are far more reasons to be hopeful “when we have friends to rely on” (Summa Theologiae, II-II, 17, 8). If the object of our hopes can extend no further than what we might be able to secure for ourselves, then our hopes will necessarily be rather cautious and limited. But if there are people who not only love us and care for us and want what is best for us but will also help us achieve it, then our hopes can be much more daring and expansive. We do not hope alone, we hope together. Hope requires companions, people who want our good and who help us along our way, and like any friend, God accompanies us, blesses us, steadies and encourages us so that the absolutely best thing we could ever hope for will be ours.
To live in hope is to want nothing less for ourselves than what God wants for us. If that were the fundamental desire of our lives, what would change? How would we be different? At the very least, it would free us from the exhausting habit of worrying excessively about ourselves and release us from always comparing our status and achievements with another’s. St Franics de Sales would remind us “to be who we are and be that perfectly well.”
Because God is for us and wants our good, we do not have to be anxious and fearful, calculating and cautious. We have time to love our dear neighbors. We have time to be merciful and compassionate, patient and generous. We have time to listen and to be present, time to encourage and support, because we know that what God’s love envisions for us will be fulfilled. Hope frees us from the burden of thinking that so much depends on us that we become oblivious to the blessings around us. Each day God calls us out of ourselves in order to draw others more fully to life through our kindness and goodness. For each of us, for the Mount Community, for pilgrims, hope is a new and promising way of life characterized by joy and gratitude, service and generosity, hospitality and celebration and even the freedom to fail.
This year, may we all walk as pilgrims of hope—
—open to mystery,
—committed to growth,
—and believing that the seeds we carry within us are already full of promise.
Have a mindset of resilience, faith and forward movement. Let us be together as ONE emphasizing community, learning and shared growth.
Maxim 97: Hold on to hope!
When you face obstacles and opposition, let go of fear and hold on to hope in God.
Take a moment to ask yourself:
What seed do I want to plant this year?
Where do I need to hold on to hope?
And how can I be a companion to others on this journey we share?
Let us walk this year together, not rushing, not wandering aimlessly, but journeying with intention, with faith, and with hope.
May this be a year of blessing and discovery for us all.
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