New Year – innerwoven

It’s the last day of the year. ‘Finally’, say some. ‘Big deal’, say others. We seem to really love these arbitrary chronologies; new leaf-page turns, as it were. Any opportunity, either actual or manufactured by which to measure ourselves against the cosmic yardstick of success. “Let’s see how we did,” we tell ourselves, “with the three hundred and sixty five chances we were just given.”

Were we good enough? Did our decisions prove correct enough, or at least useful enough? Are we “better off” now than we were when last we stood at this threshold? Aren’t these the same questions we asked this time last year.

Well, s**t.

Whatever one believes about New Year celebrations and the random significance we may or may not foist upon them, allow me to share a few clear reliables.

However one may feel about one’s place in the world comparative to last year, our belovedness remains unchanged. God, apparently (and sometimes, on our off days, with little reason), is rather fond of us. Each one is deeply loved and cherished. As much now as last year. Have hope.
Whatever chaos, cares, or calamities we faced in 2024, with the coming year there are still the kernels of hope planted deep in the soil of grace. God’s abiding presence with all of us does not change on the altar of a Roman calendar. It is always total, unchanging, and calendarless. Have hope.
Whatever plans we made, course we charted, intentions we implemented (or not) that came to naught, our worth is determined by things much less measurable than platitudes, promises, plans, or productivity. We are forever children of God, loved unreasonably well and with unseasonable consistency. Have hope.
Similarly, as one well-versed in shoulding all over myself on a pile of ripe could-would, whatever resolutions I make for the coming year may, no, will reflect the light of Christ in me, not some perceived darkness into which I may trudge, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or not. We are all so much more than resolutions made or broken, promises made and kept (or not), hopes realized or dashed. Have hope.

So then, having just finished my final cappuccino of 2024, I sit before my journal not with the pen of guilt, embarrassment, or self-abasement but with joy, gratitude, and expectation happily swimming in the blessing and presence of God. That is the spirit in which I choose to bid adieu to this year.

I crane my neck and shove my not-so-inconspicuous nose forward into whatever 2025 smells like. And, whatever it is I smell is not for me to say. Instead, it is for me – for us, simply to breathe in, greeting it all with gratitude and a whispered prayer for those who will never have opportunity to do the same.

Here’s to Hogmanay hopefulness and a happy, and honest, 2025.

ligament [lig´ah-ment]
1. a band of fibrous tissue connecting bones or cartilages, serving to support and strengthen joints.

Already a few days in, we butt up against the tail-end of one year and make our way into another. A tail yet to wag. A tale yet to be written. This was a task best left until all the days of 2017 had been fully harvested and I could start bundling them into manageable piles.

For now, I am compelled to say that, in ways that matter most, I am grateful for 2017. On one level, I’m glad to escort its ass out the door, holding it open as it leaves (the door, that is!). However, it is gratitude that wins out over any other, lesser thing. And, as many have said so much better than I, to be grateful is to be always happy or, at least hopeful that happy will return soon enough.

This has been a year of returnings, of homecoming. I am drawn back to previous iterations of my self, albeit with the benefit of failure-bought wisdom. The overweening esotericism of the past few years is moving aside for a much more sensory guy. Less soul and more smell, feel, carry, see…hold.

I’m beginning to think our souls are much more rooted in our feet, hands, nostrils, eyes, and tastebuds than some airy-fairy nexus untouched and untouchable by we mortals. There is no division of labour. We don’t leave the world and our bodies behind in order to attend to our souls. Similarly, in a full-on, head-first dive into our world, waist-deep in shit and woe, we don’t have to leave our souls behind. They’ll get there first.

There is, simultaneously, a greater depth and immediacy to a life lived in one place at a time as a total and complete entity: body, soul, heart; sweat and spit. It buys back from the bleak, divided landscape of dualism, an holistic sense of peace and unity.

I reflected recently Jesus’ little visit to Sheol where he encouraged the prisoners, stuck in limbo, to look up for “their redemption draweth nigh.” A very physical Jesus went to the disembodied not to tell them that some ghostly, spiritual paradise awaited. The opposite actually. A great banquet with Jesus and friends in a great city was being prepared. Their souls would cough up new bodies, not the other way around.

Advent and its fruition at the Christ Mass says something utterly unique, a truth so utterly transfixing, that all the earliest characters in the drama found themselves winging it. Just a lot of gawking, and fear, and shivering with stuttered awe and wonder. In such circumstances, I dare say we would do the same.

The Christmas story says many things. But, at the front of the line is the simple idea that God is, more than anything else, profoundly physical, actual. Not just ideas to think. Right stuff to say or do. God is with us. God IS us. Conversely, it means we are like God.

There are many out there who, like me, are constantly seeking to nurture something mystical and otherworldly within ourselves as though God were somehow uninterested in the messy little details of our tiny lives. This is not to suggest that we ignore “spiritual” matters in favour of “earthly” ones. It is the growing belief that those are not two sides of the same coin. They ARE the coin. God cares as much about my health, relationships, and the overall physicality of my existence as he does the height of my goosebumps when I pray.

In Jesus, God came not to save our souls. He came to save US. You and me. Body, soul, spirit. In Jesus, God came to realign our past, present, and future into one single unity. He religamented (re-ligion) the disembodied and as such disempowered parts of our humanity. Jesus came that we might become MORE human, not less. And, contrary to what contemporary evangelicalism might have us believe, he came not with some revivalist message of the sweet by ‘n by.

He came to heal our bodies, our memories, our broken bits. To remind us of what we truly are: beloved but broken, loved but lost. Why?

Because we can’t feast at a table any other way.