The New Year

I got tired of people posting nonsense about 2020 being a cursed year and how they were glad it was over. So I wrote:   

Please stop acting like years are magical or cursed and everything that happened to you was 2020's fault. The same shit that happened on December 31st is the same shit going down today.

Now here's the thing: that's some logic I absolutely agree with, and yet, in the midst of troubles which threaten to overwhelm me with anger or worry of depression, I had to stop and catch myself. Yes, we are four days into a new month and four days into a new year, really at its very first business day. And I am thinking of all the troubles tha come from an addle witted father wielding his dead wife's bankbook and the ability to pay for my mother's funeral seeing as, in her selfishness, she never took out a life insurance policy. In many ways I very much feel held hostage to the past. 

When my mother died, I did not feel like she was in heaven. I did not feel her presense. I did not know where she was. I couldn't quite imagine her in heaven, not only because I can't imagine heaven but because I couldn't imagine her wanting to be there. In those days I had vague belief in her going on because I needed to. This is sort of how I feel with this belief in the new year. I believe in its goodness because I need to believe in it. At Yule, not the other day, but on the 21st, we began the celebration of the New Year with food, with drinking, with prayer, with the list of days that led up to and away from Christmas. Now they New Year is under way and I HAVE to believe that it means something, that I am renewed. I have to believe that the salvation of Christmas is not some very tired salvation from sins so I can go to a world in the future that is better, but salvation how from all the shit that surrounds me.

This is the time of Epiphany, as we move the magi across the room, closer and closer to the stable, it is like a game, but it is like the oldest games which in themselves are sacramental and have great meaning. As we move them we move with them and resolve to gain a little wisdom and come closer to the stable at Bethlehem. We continue to take the road to Jesus.