IN A NEW YEAR

Last Sunday, we were reminded that the Last Sunday After Trinity, now known as the Sunday Before Advent, and known in Catholic circles as Christ the King, is in fact the last Sunday of the liturgical year. So tomorrow, the First Sunday in Advent, begins a new year. And it begins so quietly. One little candle in the darkness, in the storms, in the long nights of snow, in all the depths of the world. About that we can talk tomorrow --  but what about this new year, then? There should at least be a little celebration, a sense that renewal is not doomed but possible, a consciousness that, as someone put it, we fall down ten times; but when we get up the eleventh time, that’s faith. And hope.

   Many years ago, in early January, Schultz published a Peanuts cartoon featuring Lucy looking crossly at the sky and saying, “We’ve been cheated! It’s not a new year! They’ve given us a used year!” Sometimes January’s new year can feel like that. But the new year of Advent should not. No matter where we are, how we are, in that new year the year can be new. In our hearts, in our minds, and – let’s bring back that entity the Enlightenment downplayed – in our souls, a spring is possible. Somebody wrote that the fig tree is such a beloved symbol in the Bible because it burgeons, it gets leaf-buds, very early, yet its fruit ripen late. So if in the spring of this new year we bud early but then not much seems to happen, let us not be sad or discouraged: there will be a summer, and there will be fruit.

   And a final word about “the season” – “the holiday season”, “the shopping season” and all those things we love to get angry at even as we are part of them. A new year suggests a few good resolutions. Could we perhaps begin with the resolution not to be defensive about Christmas, not to bitch at bad music in shopping centres, not to grouch and grinch and complain? A resolution to live this season – which is as much happily pagan as it is, for us, also happily religious – with confidence and pleasure, on whatever scale pleases us and those we love? Such a resolution would help increase the joy of the world in expectation of the dies Natalis, would allow us to smile at our families, our neighbours, and strangers, and to pass on whatever help we can spare to those whose new year begins in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity. In newness of life.