On Wednesday Year 6 led a beautiful prayer and liturgy for the whole school and for their families. The theme was the Jubilee Year-Pilgrims of Hope. They started with a small group, holding candles, singing ‘Give us Hope O Lord’, one of the new One Life Music songs written specially for the Jubilee Year. The rest of the class joined them one by one, bringing candles of their own and placing them on their prayer focus, then joining their voices to swell the singing. It was a beautiful way to begin.
The children explained what the Jubilee year was and after listening to Luke 4:16-21, where Jesus visits the synagogue and reads from the prophet Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
The class told us that, inspired by Jesus’ example, we can share in his mission to create a world of justice, peace and love, before physically building up a large version of the Jubilee Year logo, explaining the symbolism behind each part.
The children pointed to the words of Pope Francis, in Laudato Si, where he says that : All it takes is one good person to restore hope, and shared their metaphors for hope that they had chosen and illustrated in stained glass effect artwork. After sharing their inspirational metaphor, each child hung their artwork on prayer focus tree at the front.
Pope Francis has asked us to Fan the Flame of Hope this year – to work together to make our world a better place for all. As they finished, the class prayed that we will all put our faith into action this year and become little lights of hope in our families, our school community and in the wider world, before singing ‘Song of Hope’.
It was a wonderful way to start our School pilgrimage of hope, and to see such confident, inspirational young people living out our School mission filled us all with hope for the future.
