Full knee-deep lies the winter snow,
And the winter winds are wearily sighing:
Toll ye the church bell sad and slow,
And tread softly and speak low,
For the old year lies a-dying.
Old year you must not die;
You came to us so readily,
You lived with us so steadily,
Old year, you shall not die.—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Death of the Old Year.”
SO once more, we are at it again. We ready ourselves to ring out 2024, and ring in 2025. As at every New Year’s, we shall celebrate. One is reminded of the late Dame Maggie Smith in the 1998 film, Curtain Call. Her character, Lily Marlowe, is a ghost who always returns on New Year’s Eve to New York’s Players’ Club, at whose festivities in 1927 she met Max Gale (Michael Caine), her eventually estranged-in-life-and-in-death husband. Stephenson Lowe (James Spader) is the hapless new owner of their former home and current aunt. As ghosts they bicker, but do not really speak to each other — in the end it become apparent that their current mode of existence is actually a sort of Purgatory. Stephenson runs into both of them, apart, each unaware of the other’s presence, at the Players’ New Year’s party for 1998. Having spoken to Max, he runs into Lily, having realised that each of them returns every year. He asks her why she does so. Lily responds, “I just come here because I like the atmosphere. The colours, the lights, the costumes, and the music.” Stephenson interjects, “It makes for a little nostalgia, doesn’t it?” “I suppose so,” she says. “Times gone by, ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Why not?”
While that particular New Year’s Eve sees Max and Lily reconciled and so sprung from their Purgatory, the more corporeal of us are left with some major questions. New Year’s Eve, for the more nostalgically minded among us, inevitably does indeed make us think of those gone by. The first that I can recall, when I was quite small — 1963-64, when we lived in Mount Kisco, New York. “Oh, what a night, late December, back in ’63,” as Franki Valli and the Four Seasons croon. There was 1975-76, when my father took me to a French-Canadian New Year’s ball in Los Angeles, and then — still in our evening clothes, we camped out on Pasadena, California’s Colorado Boulevard to watch the Rose Parade — every local does it once, and only once. The celebration for 1978-79 caught the five of us, my parents, brother, future sister-in-law, and self, at the ultra-formal ball at the then newly reopened Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles — our ladies in ballgowns, we three in our respective military dress uniforms. So many have followed since — although one of the most remarkable was 2020-21, here at the International Theological Institute in Trumau, Austria. Even under lockdown we contrived to have a good time — and I introduced my fellow students to Guy Lombardo’s Auld Lang Syne — none had ever heard of it or him.
But memories of specific celebrations lead to wider ones — of the course of one’s entire life. Is one happy being where one is? I so, then even the mistakes and disasters of the past are reasons for gratitude, because they played their role in getting us here. But if one is unhappy with his state in life, then even the memories of victory are painful, because they too contributed to the present situation. Either way, however, one has to bear in mind that ultimately God’s Will shall be done — and we must pray for the grace not only to let it happen, but for the grace to cooperate with that Will. To the degree that we can do that, in that direction leads happiness. It is for this reason that the Church enjoins us to end the year with a Te Deum — which we can chant or recite in the time before the big ball drops in Time Square. We should be grateful and rejoice in another year completed, regardless of how we feel.
But after the stroke of Midnight, the Church would have us say or chant the Veni Creator Spiritus, and this too is precisely how it should be. Because if part of New Year’s is looking backwards, part is also looking to the future. Annoying as the old Hippie mantra, “to-day is the first day of the rest of your life” was — it was also true. As Ebenezer Scrooge discovered upon awaking from his encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, “The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!”
For the Catholic, it is not simply at the New Year that one can stop, take stock, and identify areas in which he could or must do better — and make resolutions to do so. Thanks to the incredible gift of the Sacrament of Penance, he may do this quite as often as he needs to. The New Year does offer us a convenient annual starting point, of course; but as soon as we emerge from the Confessional, we are once again as sinless as we were upon emerging from the waters of Baptism — itself a new birth, a new start.
Moreover, those of us who are older, and likelier to be trapped, as it were, in contemplation of our own mortality, our own failures, and our own successes and those of our peers, can use this time to look at the young people in our lives — friends and family alike. Just as, in New Years’ gone by, our elders looked at us, and our youth and freshness gave them hope in the future — and a desire to help that future along — so too should our young people do with us. Are there evils abroad in Church and State? To be sure — but in one way or another, there always have been such. Generation after generation have done their best to equip their young to deal with such, and so must and should we — although knowing, as did our own elders, that they shall face battles beyond our comprehension in some ways, and old as time in others.
Future and past are only two aspects of the New Year, however. December 31 is the feast of Pope St. Sylvester; January 1 is that of the Circumcision of Our Lord — the first of His seven blood-sheddings for our Salvation, and the affirmation of His heirship to the Davidic Kingship of Israel. In a word, New Year’s Day is an integral affirmation of His Incarnation, of His being True God and True Man. This is particularly fitting because these two days are central parts of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Pope St. Sylvester, as the Pope under whom Emperor Constantine legalised the Church, was at it were the sponsor of the “incarnation” of the Church into Society, from which it had heretofore been as a banished spirit. From now on, the Mystical Body of Christ was on its way to ensouling the Roman Empire — a task which was finished by Theodosius the Great in 380 A.D.
SO do NOT throw out the Christmas decorations, as so many do after New Year’s — and as hotels and restaurants tend to do; retail stores are already putting up the red hearts for St. Valentine’s Day. But we have not only the Octave Days of the Holy Innocents and of Ss. Stephen and John in the pre-1954 calendar ahead, but, on January 2, the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus in the 1960 version, and in the most recent one the feasts of New York’s own St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and Philadelphia’s St. John Neumann on January 4 and 5 — the latter day of which is the magical Twelfth Night. St. Andre Bessette shares the traditional date of Epiphany, with its threefold mystery of the Three Kings, the Baptism of Our Lord, and the Marriage Feast at Cana. This too is as it should be, because while we make mark of the New Year due to its significance in our own lives, those lives themselves are part of a much greater picture. Regardless of our own memories and hopes, the mysteries of the holy season are what are most important; we should never allow our personal dramas to cloud our vision in their regard.
As with the other seasons and feasts of the Church in all her various rites, Christmas gives us a particular foretaste of Heaven. If we think back to all of the wonderful times we have had, in Church, at home, in restaurants and hotels, in squares and on the street, in stores and markets during this period, with family, friends, and strangers — living and dead — we shall have some slight indication of what awaits the Just in the Land beyond the Stars. That unchanging Kingdom is the Reality; this present world of sin, death, and decay is the Shadow. So when we toast the New Year, 2025, let us think of the Heaven that lies beyond it.
