New Year's column

As this piece is being sent to the editor, the New Year is just on the horizon, and the old year is tottering to its conclusion. Some of us greet the New Year with a set of resolutions. Some of them are attempts at trying something new. Others are attempts to try to bring back the past, especially the weight on the scale.

God loves the new. Creation itself (Hebrew: bara) is in itself a new act. Whenever the past has a stranglehold on our journey, God looks toward the east, the rising sun.  God brings life out of death’s cold tomb. God creates freshness amidst decay.

Psalms repeatedly tells us to sing to the Lord a new song. Isaiah 43 emphasizes it, in the midst of a dispiriting time when the promises of restoration seemed to lie unfulfilled. -I do a new thing, do you not perceive it? Toward this end, even the heaven and the earth will be made new (Is. 65:17-25 Even Lamentations sees God’s mercies as new every morning (3:22-3). Ezekiel looks toward a time when a new heart will be within us (36:26). In the New Testament, Jesus spoke of the power of the new to burst an old wineskin. Paul breaks into poetry: if anyone in Christ that one is a new creation-the past is finished and gone (2 Cor. 5:17). The Bible’s close has God saying behold I make all things new.

The past can be a drag, a hindrance to development. The ghosts of a misty past continue to haunt us. Its chains entangle our movement. It can blind us to future possibilities and options.

Facing novel situations and changes can be most disconcerting. It takes a stable sense of self and security in community to be able to face the shaking of the foundations. When I was young, Robert Jay Lifton argued for a protean self, one that could change constantly to be able to surf the rapidity of change in our time. (Recall that Proteus is connected to the turbulent changing of the sea). Without a secure sense of self, I would fear that the sheer weight of change could fragment a person.

We have been a country that has embraced newness. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the historian Turner feared of what would happen to us with the closing of the frontier and its promise of a new start. Our advertising constantly beckons us to the new product.

It seems as if we are stuck in a bit of a rut. The middle class is shrinking a bit and social mobility has grown more difficult. We look to the past as guide and hope for a past revenant, to borrow the new movie title. The future seems to beckon less brightly and may feel more like a looming pall is about to descend. We have become much more averse toward risk than we were.

One way to look at divine providence is that god is constantly at work weaving a new future day after day, epoch after epoch. God bends the arc of history toward a better world, a destiny worth living to see. God is capable of taking the shards of the past and forging them in new ways to fit our day and time. The God of time sees a future that we can scarcely even be led to imagine.

Here is a blessing from John O’Donahue: “may a slow wind work these words/ of love around you/ an invisible cloak/ to mind your life… and though your destination is not yet clear/you can trust the promise of this opening/unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning/that is at one with your life’s desire.”

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