Cheers and Blessings

Here’s to the past. Here’s to the present. Here’s to the future. This New Year’s weekend we spent our celebrations toasting our friends, wishing them well, and hoping for good days to come. This is the stuff of new year’s festivals.

New year’s festivals are frequently the stuff of anthropological studies. While we choose to celebrate our New Year’s Day on January First, there are other times and places which other cultures celebrate new beginnings in their human history. What is held in common with these new year festivals is that they are renewing and revitalizing to the communities in which they are celebrated.

An example within our own Roman Catholic community is our celebration of the recently completed Advent Season. As with these festivals, Advent spoke to us of our beginnings, our hopes, and our endings in life. In all of it the community was invited to be alert to the happenings of God in human history. In the attention to the action of God, we believe they continue to happen in our times. We are renewed and revitalized.

New Year's
What we celebrate this weekend is a civil holiday. Within the Christian community, in one sense, we overlay a religious dimension. January 1st is a holy day of obligation. In the liturgical calendar it is the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God. In most of our memories, we will remember that it was an observance of a World Day for Peace with its own proper Mass texts.

In liturgical history, as in anthropology, dimensions develop around festivals. The same happens around our Christian festivals. New Year’s is within the context of the Christmas and Epiphany Feasts. As such it’s core is the central mystery of the Incarnation. We celebrate that in Christ, God definitively entered our human history. The Infancy Narratives, even with their seemingly romantic language, retell the whole gospel story. They are in reality a mini-gospel which is intensely and intimately told.

New Year’s looks to our past, which is the whole history of God’s fidelity to us. The present reality is that we continue to be saved in the death-rising of the Lord whose birth we celebrate at Christmas. Our hope is that the Father will continue to be faithful to us in Christ in the days to come.

In the retelling of these stories we are renewed and revitalized. We retouch our roots. The context of this storytelling is within the faith community and within our family and friends. It’s with believers and family members, that the story makes sense and is understandable. Like all festivals, our communities and families are transformed and made new. In the festivals we have new hope.

Ritual, Food, and Drink
What we observe and share at this time of year is that rituals are superimposed on rituals. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, New Year’s, Mary, Mother of God, and our hope of peace – all these dimensions come together and are intertwined. We have our liturgical rituals, our family gatherings, and celebrations where we eat and drink with friends. The foundations for our human life are celebrated and we renew our commitment to one another.

Along with storytelling, eating and drinking are the usual components of ritual. New Year’s uses the same activities to renew and revitalize our human life and history. The table metaphor helps us to understand the experience. People gather around a table. They tell their shared stories and history. This sharing is enacted in eating and drinking. Their relationship and experience is re-created and made new. This is done with very large strokes and, in one sense, in excess. Life and good things overflow!

Mary, Mother of God
The central image of our New Year festival this weekend is Mary, Mother of God. In Mary, God centers our human history. Jesus is the Son of God and Son of Mary – the human and divine come together. Our lives are transformed in the mystery of the Incarnation. It is for these reasons that we gather at the Lord’s Table to eat and to drink. In this mystery God is with his People yet another time.

CDH