My dear sisters and brothers, I don’t brag about this a lot, but I am a great fan of the comics in the newspapers. To justify this I say that sometimes in the comics you’ll find commentaries on contemporary events and insights into human behaviour that are at least as telling and as perceptive as those one reads  in the news stories and the various columns of our papers. Sometimes even more so!

One of the memories of my growing up is that every New Year’s day, there was always seemed to be a cartoon in the paper which portrayed the New Year as a young baby, fresh, bright, in diapers , striding confidently to say good bye to the old year who was old, bent, battered and bruised and limping out of the picture. Is that an image familiar to you?  It always struck me that it only took one year to turn the young fresh baby New Year into the battered and aged Old Year.

I looked in this year’s paper to see if I could find a cartoon of the baby New Year, but couldn’t find any. Perhaps it has gone out of fashion, maybe even years ago. This weekend’s editorial cartoon featured a flip chart with a bright and clean new page, the promise of a new start on things. Maybe that’s more optimistic that my old familiar cartoon, but perhaps not as realistic because it puts aside the rough side of life which we all face and deal with.

Indeed our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, in his New Year’s Message for the World day of Peace, recognizes this one side of life that affects us all. He says: “I invite you to look to 2012 with this attitude of confident trust. It is true that the year now ending has been marked by a rising sense of frustration at the crisis looming over society, the world of labour and the economy, …. It seems as if a shadow has fallen over our time, preventing us from clearly seeing the light of day.”

I don’t think that the Holy Father is being pessimistic. However he is not one to be afraid of looking reality in the face and speaking about it. Indeed, to the Holy Father’s remarks about the world-level shadows, we can add our own list of the personal shadows that fall over our own lives and have challenged us over the past year. Without listing them, we are aware of our own fears and anxieties. We know where the pains lie in our feelings and in our hearts and memories. We know the events that have left our year now past a little bruised and tattered like the Old Year in the comic strip. 

And yet, we are able to stand on the edge of a New Year, not with despair but with hope. The birth of Jesus and God becoming one of us that we have celebrated in this Christmas Season enable us enter into this New Year with confident trust. The Gospel reading for this Octave Day of Christmas, the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God, is the conclusion of St. Luke’s telling of the birth of Jesus. The Shepherds are certainly in the foreground.

The shepherds are poor. They have an awful job – living out of doors, their work is boring and tedious, and they were dirty. Everyone presumed that they were all dishonest and so they had little respect from people. Nobody envied their lives as shepherds. Nonetheless, we know that the message awaited for centuries by God’s people was proclaimed by angelic messengers from God himself to them. And these poor, dishevelled, disreputable men held the honour of proclaiming the message of hope and joy to the world and to all history. One does not need to be great to be favoured by God.

When our world, or the events of our own lives, makes us feel that we are at the bottom of the heap, we can turn and look at the shepherds of Bethlehem. And we remember that it is to the likes of us, even when we are at our lowest point, that God gave the most special of all tasks. The shepherds were told not to be afraid. They were to hear good news of great joy. They were to go and find a sign that the Messiah had been born for them. That sign was Jesus, newly born, and lying in a manger.

And in the Gospel today we hear how the shepherds did what they were asked; they went to Bethlehem, indeed, St. Luke tells us, they went with haste, and they found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. They found the sign the angels said they would. And then they made known what the angels had told them about the child to all around them.

Here in these shepherds we see, I think, as in a very small nut shell, the description of what God asks of us in our life: all of us, whether the highest of the high or the lowest of the low are called to listen, called to go to see what God has done for us in our lives and we are called to tell those around us.

As we set out into a New Year we are aware of wonderful gifts that God has given to us to help us live our lives with hope, with meaning and with happiness. And so we can stride into our New Year with confident trust.

And so today, like the shepherds, we listen to God’s special message given to us today. We hear St Paul telling us the meaning of Jesus’ birth for us: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive sonship.”The baby the shepherd’s saw lying in a stable manger was born so that you and I might become sons and daughters of God. This is what we hear in God’s Word, and this indeed is what God has done for us when we were born anew in the font of our baptism.

In St. Paul’s words today we hear of our great dignity. As we listen, we come to appreciate the dignity that God has given to us. Upon this dignity then we build the respect we have for ourselves and the respect we have for others.

Paul goes on to say: “And because you are sons and daughters, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”We are not anyone’s slaves but rather we are the heirs of God’s life and treasure. And so we enter the New Year with great hope. Regardless of the challenges of life, regardless of life’s difficulties, we know that our future is the life Jesus lives with the Father now and forever. We know that our future is the fullness of life, the fullness of joy forever.

And finally, we enter the future, secure in the knowledge that Jesus has given us his own Mother to be our own mother. Mary continually invites us to ponder with her the meaning of all of this great mystery of what God has done for us. And so we journey through our days and months with Mary’s help and intercession. In confidence and trust we pray the ancient prayer of the Church:We fly to your protection, O Holy Mother of God: Despise not our prayers in our necessities But deliver us from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin! Amen.