The song is already present with a video-lyric (video with synchronised lyrics) on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, on the donboscoalsud pages and will soon also be available on the main digital music streaming platforms. In addition, on the new IME SYM blog there is an explanation of the text, verse by verse: a digital content that allows you to discover references and points of reflection useful for making ‘Hope!’ a formative tool in meetings with young people from the various Salesian settings!
The creative process leading to the recording of a new song is never simple, especially if you want to tell a meaningful story and condense meaningful messages into a few verses. On several occasions, the young people from the SYM have collected small cues offered by many children and young people, and turned them into music and words: behind each verse of the song there are fragments of their lives.
The performers (Ilaria, Alessia, Cristina, Flavio and Stefano) were selected by the artistic sector ‘DB Spark’ of the SYM, among about 20 applications received from all over Italy, and they have put their talent and passion at the disposal of the soundtrack of the youth events of this Jubilee year; precisely for this reason the title ‘Hope!’ recalls the motif of hope, which is at the heart of the Pastoral Proposal 2024/25 and the Jubilee 2025.
‘Hope!’ is the diary page of a young man who continually moves in the balance between the desire to discover himself and the world and the bewilderment and uncertainties of a life that has been placed in his hands without an instruction manual. In an age without great references, in which time flows like a feed and history is an algorithm to be passively subjected to, rather than a canvas on which to creatively leave one's mark, thanks to the encounter with Don Bosco the young man savours the taste of true joy that comes from being waited on by love: feeling loved gives him the impetus to look beyond, to find that deep desire that shakes him from within, gets him up and sets him on the path towards his own dream.
From love, the young person learns hope, not the hope of false optimism and illusions of a future that in the end do not exist, but the hope that concretely opens doors of redemption and fulfilment: these are the opportunities of each day to make decisive choices, to put one's heart at the service of others, to consider even frailties and failures as steps towards a full self-realisation. ‘I want to live’ is the cry of those who want to take their lives seriously and tell the world what is most beautiful about them; of those who no longer want to be satisfied with pre-packaged and canned solutions that are always the same, but who want to experience the beauty of newness that only they can bring.
‘Hope!’ is the hope of those who do not stand still and wait, but get up to build their own destiny, with muscles and with faith, “with their heart beyond the clouds and their shoes in the dust”; it is the living and true hope of those who are “certain of being anchored to heaven”, of those who place their trust not in things that pass, but in the loving gaze and heart of a person in the flesh, Jesus Christ.
Salesian Youth Movement, Southern Italy
