New Year's Eve

The Times Square New Year's Eve "Ball" (photo) is ready for its annual descent later tonight. And millions of us are getting ready to watch it, in person at Times Square or, more likely, on TV, each of us uniting our individual histories and hopes with millions of others, all associating ourselves with this reliable ritual. What is it about the annual turn of the calendar that brings out all this intense emotion and activity at midnight tonight?

I am reminded of the finale of season 6 of Downton Abbey, set appropriately on New Year's Eve, and this final dialogue between Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, and Isobel Crawley;

Violet: "It makes me smile! The way every year we drink to the future, whatever it may bring."

Isobel: "What else can we drink to? We're going forwards into the future, not back into the past!"

Violet: "If only we had the choice!"

Presumably, the Dowager Countess was intended to represent a nostalgic affection for a more stable past in contrast to a plainly uncertain future. Fair enough, although the 30 or so years of the early 20th century that the series supposedly had covered clearly contradicted any notion of a better, more stable past as a time to choose to go back to, were that option ever actually available. For better or for worse, as Isobel well understood, we are propelled forward into the future, whether we like it or not. So we might as well toast the future, "whatever it may bring."

That said, New Year's Eve does make me nostalgic for New Year's Eves past and the worlds we have lost - and, more to the point, the people, once part of my life, who have been lost, starting, of course, with my own family. I think back to years of joyful New Year's Eves spent, in a kind of timeless, suspended childhood innocence, with a multitude of aunts, uncles, and cousins, then seemingly important players in my small world, now long gone, that world itself now just a shadow.

I now have the privilege of spending New Year's Eve with friends from my Church family. Time passing by loses much of its allure with advancing age. But friendship abides, and assumes even greater significance as it fills up what is increasingly lacking in life's obviously waning years.

Time has always been very precious – precisely, I suppose, because we have only such a limited supply of it, a reality of which New Year's Eve so forcefully reminds us. But, by becoming part of our limited time in the Incarnation of the Son  of God which we celebrate with such splendor at this season, God has turned our limited time on earth into a time of unlimited opportunity. Against the lamentable background of cherished memories of people passed away, lives lost, relationships ruptured, and unfulfilled expectations, the mystery of the Incarnation invites us to look ahead to a new year with gratitude for God's gifts and to go forward into an uncertain and possibly frightening future, not without anxiety, but buoyed nonetheless by the transcendent hope that counts as one of God’s greatest Christmas gifts to us.