I was wondering this morning how this new year will be different from the previous years of my life.  For one thing, I will become older and I may even become wiser if I find ways to leave myself open to learning and processing what I learn in ways that will keep me from doing harm to others.  In my thinking this morning I tried to convince myself that the world is less scary today than it was on January First, 2013.  Images of Kim Jong-un and several other worrisome heads-of-state flitted through my mind followed by a fantasy of Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann, and Darrell Issa dancing in the Rotunda of the Capitol to Mussorgsky’s  “Night on Bald Mountain,” so at first my mind clouded over with foreboding; but then I thought about President and Mrs. Obama and their two daughters in the White House, and of New York City’s new mayor and his bi-racial family, and Cory Booker, and California’s raising the minimum wage and about my state’s continuing success in legislating stricter gun control laws, and about the steady decrease in the numbers of brain-numb  people who insist that LGBT folks shouldn’t be allowed full citizenship, and about the checker at the grocery store this morning who smiled at me and said, “I hope you have a very good new year… and I reminded myself that I much prefer living with hope than with pessimism; so, yes, I believe 2014 can be better in many ways than 2013 was.  Oh… almost forgot to say how glad I am that Jorge Mario Bergoglio,  who once worked as a nightclub bouncer before seminary and long before being elected Pope, chose the name Francis to signal that he believes the church’s mission should be primarily about addressing the suffering of the poor. Also… there is Malala Yousavfzai, the teenage Afghani girl targeted and wounded by the Taliban for wanting to be educated who is teaching us the meaning of the word bravery. 

YES!