WHY CELEBRATE THE NEW YEAR?
(Tuesday, December 31)
Nothing actually changes on January 1, except a symbol; the number of the year, which the whole world has come to count more or less from the year of the birth of Christ. But nothing else changes, really. It’s not the beginning of any season; it’s the middle of either winter or summer, depending on the hemisphere in which we live; and it’s not the beginning of the school year or of the church year. So, January 1 is just a symbolic beginning.
But symbols matter. Numbers matter. They keep us sane, because we feel disoriented if we lose track of time, which we order by using the symbols that are numbers. The following will sound strange, but I think it’s healthy to be attentive to numbers, and even to honor numbers, especially those that mark the time. In Christian tradition, we even sanctify time-marking numbers, by attaching to every date in the church year commemorations of saints or events from Salvation History; by attaching to certain Hours of each day certain holy memories; and, as mentioned above, by counting our years from the approximate date of the birth of Christ. I think that this honoring of time-marking numbers counters the unhealthy human tendency to dread the numbers that remind us of the unstoppable passage of time, although time is a God-given gift that is our friend and not our foe. Also, in our Internet Age, when time becomes flattened through the non-stop, 24/7 flow of disordered information, our tradition of honoring and sanctifying time-marking numbers helps us maintain our sanity.
So, it’s a good thing, I think, to honor and welcome the new number of the year that we will begin to use on January 1, and to do so in a faith-inspired manner, as yet another “year of the Lord’s favor.” Thank You, Lord, for bringing us to the end of this year, and please keep us teachable in the new one.
