Blessing the Blasted New Year

This article is by Chris Wheeler:

Here we are, chomping at the bit to launch ourselves into our meticulous plans for the new year, inspired and hopeful and totally energized! I just got so tired writing that sentence I almost fell off my chair.

We barely survived the end of the year. Never mind the wall-to-wall high-octane events or the junk food, we were (horror!!) with people non-stop. People we love dearly, of course. But this introvert, frankly, should have instituted hourly quiet time breaks to maintain his sanity.

Our little urchins, hopped up on hot chocolate and gingerbread as they were for about 90% of the time (the 10% being when they slept), were utterly adorable and if another one of them climbs on my lap and asks to watch Little Bear my response might be to wrap them in pine boughs and stuff them up the chimney.

And did I mention the singing? Being a music leader at your church has its perks, one of which is to get into Christmas music early, right when you’re feeling the need for it. But then you’re singing songs during the evening family readings, and the kids are preparing Christmas recital pieces or just pounding out five different versions of Jingle Bells, and the playlists are on repeat, and you go caroling, and on and on. By the time Christmas Day actually rolls around you’re about to bean the next maniac who suggests you sing a few carols before dinner. Just pipe down and pass the cheese ball, Opal, and nobody will get hurt.

I would love to mandate a holiday the first week in January called National Lockdown Christmas Vacation. Absolute isolation, no contact, and the first person to say Merry Christmas gets chucked out of the bubble into a snow drift.

You’re getting me grumpy this time, my friends. I can’t believe it’s already a new year. I don’t remember how we got here.

Ugh. What new thing is there to say about a new year?

We are all still ourselves, carrying whatever hopes and griefs we have accumulated in the last year into the new one. And yet we all want to look at this thing spreading before us as a fresh start. It’s no more a fresh start than a single day is a fresh start. The larger seasons of history that we find ourselves in are difficult for us to grasp and impossible for us to control — and somehow, we can’t help but try.

So we’re still all here, just past the intersection of years, looking back and looking forward. I guess we want to understand our times and seasons. We want to learn from the past and be better in the future. One of Rilke’s most famous lines is the directive, echoing from a headless Grecian dude, that “you must change your life.” This is, I imagine, what most of us are hearing and telling ourselves, in one way or another, on the cusp of a new year.

Well screw you too, Rilke. Thanks for nothing.

My problem with Rilke’s archaic abdomen blabbing on about change isn’t that I can’t change (although I have a lot of trouble with the concept), or that I have some semantic quibble about “Jesus is the one who changes people” (although I believe that thoroughly). It’s that I know he’s right, and that annoys me.

“You must change your life.” It’s another way of saying, Something’s got to give. You can’t go on this way. You have to do something. What’s it going to be?

It’s a challenge for which I have no rebuttal.

I love the idea of resolutions. Making a promise to myself and working to improve certain areas of my life sounds like a good thing for me as a human to do. I know, objectively, that I will be healthier and happier if I make a few resolutions that support my growth as a husband, father, writer, and human.

But I also know how long a year is. I’ve been spinning around the earth’s axis long enough to know that my motivations are tilted, my will is eclipsed, and my abilities are gravity-bound.

This morning on the way to work I listened to Ecclesiastes (because of course I did). It’s a perfectly grumpy book of the Bible. I recommend it to those of us who might be taking a similarly dim view of the year ahead. I feel this section in my bones:

All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccl 1:8-9)

Without Christ crashing into our lives, this is where all pursuit of betterment and human gain ends: a chasing after the wind. But when I look at Him and see His great love and power, everything He sets before me becomes charged with hopeful purpose. Grumpy old Solomon takes all the pieces of our lives we are tempted to value (power, wisdom, money, work, play) and sweeps them away, then picks up the simplest, most accessible pieces and resets them in a new pattern on the board.

Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going. (Eccl 9:7-10)

Eat. Drink. Be of good cheer. Hang out with the people you love. Do whatever is set before you. And always remember, you will die.

I wonder if the reason I have a love/hate relationship with resolutions might be because most of mine are just too big and ambitious. In the heat of many a new year I have come up with grand schedules and intricate designs. Some years I make it a week, or a month, or a few months (never that long without help from someone, btw). I always crash and burn within the first third of the year.

What if I were to resolve to enjoy a cup of coffee in silence this morning? What if I took a walk during my lunch break, just to get some sun? What if I just read a Psalm at dinner with my family instead of trying to maintain that massive family devotion plan I downloaded yesterday?

What is the one right thing I know I can do, now?

I love this: “… for God has already approved what you do.”

Christ has accomplished all things for us. We have nothing that He needs, that we might offer some righteous deed in the new year to elevate ourselves in His eyes. He is with us because He wants to be with us. He desires our growth because He loves us. He knows the limits of our frames, and He says — I am with you, always.

In the liturgy for communion, after the saints of God have eaten the bread and drunk the wine, the Book of Common Prayer offers the following words:

And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

Here’s a downright ungrumpy notion: God has prepared works for you and me this year. We get to walk in them.

Solomon tells us that newness is not available to us under the sun; it is only made by He who stands above it. And He chooses to make things new by small, consistent cycles repeating until they become big cycles: seasons are made up of dawns and dusks. The old year is just small pieces built up on each other until they spill over into a new year.

I cannot grasp the wider bounds of it all. If I look at a year before me, I quail beneath the weight of my oncoming failures. But if I look to this hour, this day before me … well, I could maybe make it through that. And if I don’t, I hear that His mercies are new every morning. I’ll have another shot at it soon enough.

The grace that carries us (Grinches, grumps, and all) into this new year is that our mighty resolutions will likely end in failure, and our tiny ones might actually follow us through. As we did in every year before, we will fall upon God’s mercy in our failures, and we will draw upon His power to make it through our days. And we will come again to the end of another year, clear away the confetti, and get on with the long obedience and the slow growth. Nothing is new under the sun. Our Lord is alive and well, and watching over us.

In this new year:

May you wake to each new day and remember His mercy.
May your coffee pot be full and your soup bowl ever steamy.
May you soak up every last drop of Vitamin D the sun has to offer.
May your work be satisfying and simple.
May your ambitions be small, and your achievements celebrated.
May your play be raucous.
May your feasting be rich and toothsome.
May your fastings season your feasts.
May you hold everyone you love just a little longer than you need to.
May your evenings be lit from within.
May your conversations be sweet and spicy and brimming with belly laughs.
May your anxieties be calmed, your fears comforted, and your griefs held.
May your rest be refilling.
And may God bless your days and the work of your hands.

Cheers, friends. Here’s to something new.