The Dean shares two powerful words of hope for the New Year.

I wish you all a very happy and peaceful new year.

On Christmas morning I mentioned in my sermon that there is a word that has been recorded only once in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is ‘Respair’. It means fresh hope, a recovery from despair. It is what I wish our Church and our world very deeply at the moment, and I hope we at Southwark Cathedral will be kind and faith-filled agents to help bring such needed respair to all our communities.

As we begin a new year together, another word we might resurrect is ‘Resipiscence’. Originally meaning an acknowledgment of one’s past misdeeds and the hope of some atonement, it broadened in meaning to refer to a coming to one’s senses and returning to a better frame of mind. Such resipiscence is at the heart of the New Year’s Resolutions that we launch into at this time of year, and then so often struggle to keep.

So, if you are trying to settle still on some worthwhile resolutions that might help bring some respair, I commend Pope Francis’s resolutions that he recommended about ten years ago. They are these:

• Take care of your spiritual life, your relationship with God, because this is the backbone of everything we do and everything we are.
• Take care of your family life, giving you children and loved ones not just money, but most of all your time, attention, and love.
• Take care of your relationships with others, transforming your faith into life and your words into goodness.
• Be careful how you speak, purify your tongue.
• Heal the wounds of the heart with the oil of forgiveness, forgiving those who have hurt us and medicating the wounds we have caused others.
• Look after your work, doing it with enthusiasm, humility, competence, passion and a spirit that knows how to thank the Lord.
• Be careful of envy and negative feelings that devour our interior peace and make us destroyed and destructive people.
• Watch out for anger that can lead to vengeance; for laziness that leads to existential euthanasia; for pointing the finger at others, which leads to pride; and for complaining continually, which leads to desperation.
• Take care of brothers and sisters who are weaker, the elderly, the sick, the hungry, the homeless and strangers, because we ill be judge on this.

If respair is to be made real, I can’t think of better resolutions for us to begin 2026.

Please pray for me as I do for you.

Mark