New Year's Heave

So, here we are then, at the climax of another 365 days, when Old Father Time, AD2006 version, has to surrender his throne to that young upstart 2007. Already in the Antipodes, the famous fireworks over Sydney Harbour Bridge, which created such a memorable image seven years ago for the millennium, will have fizzled out and jaded revellers will be feeding the new babe with tinnies and prawnies as their Summer also reaches its height. Having made contact this year (by which I still mean MMVI for the moment) with paternal cousins in Oz for the first time, I've a special reason to think of them with affection at this time.

Back here in Blighty, though, the celebrations won't be getting into gear for another four hours or so at least yet. New Year's Eve, in England at least, is a strange beast. Everybody feels they ought to be celebrating it, but a great many people don't seem to know how. And if Christmas Night seems over too soon, then the significance of this night is even more short-lived. Twelve bongs, a few thousand simultaneous bangs and then the ringing headache after too much booze, and for many- that's it. I've often thought that, actually, 1st January is just a public hangover cure masquerading as a public holiday.

Perhaps part of the problem is that this has become such a long break in the UK that most folk are tired out come midnight on the 31st. Tuesday the second will indeed have to be a heave for some,- though not those in North Britain, aka Scotland-back onto crowded commuter trains and the further shock to the wallet of the London Congestion Charge resuming, after all the festive excesses and credit card overtime. New Year can certainly bring folk down to earth quicker than a rocket stick.

Maybe it's also the case, though, that the start of the recognised civil New Year throughout most of the world now, has absolutely no significance beyond an arbitrary date on the calendar. 31st December and 1st January no more celebrate an actual astronomical event than the constellation of the Great Bear depicts an actual ursine. The earth's annual transit of the sun actually takes up rather inconveniently a little more than 365 actual days so there never was or is a point when we can truly mark the passing of this unit of time.
Maybe, in some ways, the Judaic and Islamic faiths have a more accurate calendar by focussing on the lunar year rather than the solar one, but this does lead to the somewhat inconvenient occurrence of some of their feasts and fasts at the most incongenial time some years- though this year's Hajj to Mecca, reaching it's climax co-incidentally on 1st January in the Western Calendar, seems to have attracted as astounding a number of pilgrims as ever. No doubt everyone is praying that there will be no repeat of the tragedies of recent years where sheer weight of numbers has led to stampedes and many fatalities.

For most of us, though, the turn of the year offers a convenient point for our own "annual assessment", whether in employment or not. It's the time to look back on what has been achieved and what has not during the previous twelve months, and it's the time to look forward to what the new year may offer. If ever a Christian feast were to be created for it, I guess it could be the feast of Hope: "O God Our Help in Ages past, Our Hope for Years to Come" certainly seems to have been a prevalent post-Christmas hymn heard on radio services this week.

Some may see hope in the year ahead for changes in the world's worst trouble spots. I'm no supporter of capital punishment, but the execution of Saddam Hussein on 30th December certainly brought to an end one chapter in the history of the pain-filled nation which is currently Iraq. But it hasn't solved the problems, which remain, and many must still be filled with fear, not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East, as a new year begins.

On the other hand, it's a new beginning for the United Nations, with a new Secretary-General about to take over from Kofi Annan. Ban Ki-Moon certainly looks like being a very different personality to his pre-decessor, being described in a BBC News Article as a "mild-mannered" man more interested in administration than diplomacy. But mild manners can maketh man and can lift nations from despair to hope. Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, after all, was definitively meek. I certainly don't envy Ban Ki-Moon his job, but I do pray and wish him well in it.

When all is said and done, each new year brings the hope that we are drawing closer to the return of another superman- one who, literally, was man but was also above the limitations of man and his petty, hateful, mindset. Jesus, the boy born in a lowly manger in that ill-regarded outpost which today suffers surrounded by the brick walls of fear and division which is the modern day Holy Land, grew up to be a man who offered more hope to humankind than any dictator, international leader or statesman ever can. He offered people the chance to be their real selves, to discover life in all its fulness, to be rid of enslavement to our own shortcomings- aka sin- and to find new life in him.

I don't know what this next year will bring, either for me, for you, or for the world. I could be the guy with the half-full glass of optimism, or the misanthrope with the half-empty poisoned challice of fear. I'm neither. Reminded this morning at my church's last service of 2006, I turn again to John Betjeman's lovely poem, Christmas, for a reminder of what to celebrate on New Year's Eve. Being part of the family of man, of course, and the community of nations, but more so, being one of those many billions that God so loved that he gave his ONLY son for us:

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

I wish you a joyful, peaceful and prosperous time ahead- and thanks for reading my ramblings in 2006. Keep journeying with me, anyway, as we tread into 2007. Happy New Year!