This ship has circled the sun once more. Tomorrow shall be the first of another 365 days. But for today, the last of the year, priests across the globe turn again to the evangelist John, to his writings that have become the good news of Christmas Day.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
A year shall begin tomorrow. We shall call it new with the popping of champagne bottles, blowing of horns, launching of fireworks, kisses, embraces, with goodwill and wishes and firm resolutions though our word is not God.
Perhaps therein lies hope, there in the recognition of the mere humanity of our word, its bereftness of the force of deity. With each nanosecond after the clocks ring this midnight, New Year’s Day grows old, and so do its cheer, its hope, its promise. The weakening that escorts age visits them all, and soon the vicissitudes of life besiege and seek to erase every trace of tonight’s bright midnight.
Yet the passage of time does not only weaken bones and obscure our words in the pages and chapters of yesterday. Age makes the sage. Time’s kingdom is the cradle of wisdom. The drudgery of living from day to day shall be — for the humble one who knows he knows little to nothing of how to harness his speech to mold his story — the manger that can shelter the Word that gave birth to the sun, movement to the planets and twinkling to the stars.
In the beginning was the Word. The manger of the humble — or humbled — life shall be the beginning within which the Word is, just as the Spirit hovered over the primordial chaos, just as the phoenix flaps its fledgling, fiery pinions over its own ashes and embers.
There is much about which to be humble, much for which the human heart would be right to hesitate to call the coming calendar new.
Without any resolution, the war in Syria shall turn half a decade old.
The seas between southern Europe and northern Africa, with the continent’s tribalisms and impoverishments, shall keep on doubling as cemeteries for star-crossed migrants.
Caving in to fear, the Old World shall find no respite from rulers who have forgotten how their civilization blossomed in service of the Word who welcomed all, who found welcome as a refugee with his maiden mother and foster father in the home of the Nile, having fled a ruler who feared losing his grip on power.
Here at home, about 80 percent of the population shall get a high from a mix of fear that they might get caught in the crossfire in the narcotics wars and of satisfaction in the felling of addicts, drug lords, suspects and innocents left and right.
Like Eve and Adam looking for garb in which to hide after the fall, without consciousness that water and wind, earth and animals are kin, mankind shall exploit creation in the vain effort to mask the bottomless discontent at the core of their being.
There is nothing new in these stories, these ruins of makeshift houses haunted by the same demons that harassed the ascetics of Egypt and the Holy Land when they fled there after Rome fell to invaders and decay.
Tailed by the doom of our time as by a shadow, we shall only pay lip service to the year in calling it new.
The freshness of the coming days shall not spring from our sloganeering masquerading as prophesying but shall come about with the help of our groaning and sighs, in our recognition of the mercy on the wings of each sunrise.
The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. This Word is conceived of the Spirit, is the power above the chaos, is the phoenix over the ashes, is Life going against the tide of o ur dying, who makes heaven of decaying time because He is always like a child before whom heaven’s door is ever open.
Banish Janus, sandwiched and in stasis between the past and the future. Welcome the Word, Bethlehem’s Holy Child who drives as on a chariot the sun from the world’s east to its west, creating new moments for planting seedlings, saving children, welcoming migrants, doing justice, rescuing addicts, moving mankind from the old ruins of its self-centeredness to compassion’s perennially blooming meadows.
Welcome the Word with the welcome of first love, and see a world renewed, a year truly new.