The Party's Over...

It's time to call it a day: The fourth of January two thousand and eight will do fine for the next few hours at least. Happy New Year!

Not that I've been a 24-hour party person ever since last posting to Anyway- last week, or was it last year? I had a very enjoyable Christmas, as I hope you did too, but constant jollity is just not the way we do things round here-even if for some the Christmas holiday will have lasted a fortnight and the return to work and school won't be complete til 7th of January.

The English are a funny race when it comes to celebrating New year-what is, when all's said and done, just an arbitrary point in the continuous revolving passage of the earth round the sun, when we decide to attempt to accurately measure that orbit again for another 365 "days", or as this is to be a leap year, 366. The very existence of leap years points out the folly of trying to number our days, months and years with too much precision, because the exact workings of the universe are complex and beyond our ken, as the Scots might put it.

Maybe we English are more pragmatic and a little less sentimental, but those of us south of the border have traditionally never quite managed to find the fun of New Year as well as other more outwardly flamboyant races- although as the pyrotechnic delights of London's celebrations brought Old Father Time to meet Old Father Thames once again last Monday night, it seems we're at last willing to have a try.

Indeed, the ritual of celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of another seems to have become almost a friendly international contest to see who can do it in the most spectacular fashion. Nowadays, the capital city of the UK even likes to have its cake and eat it not just as midnight but mid-day too. The New Year's Day Parade-London, originally the Lord Mayor of Westminster's attempt to have something matching his City of London counterpart's November streetfest, is now described as the biggest event of its kind in the world. It may have been influenced by Macy's parade in New York, New York, but Westminster, London has certainly produced a tradition to be proud of.

This year's parade, irrigated though it was by the first rain of 2008, certainly brought sparkle to the capital on what was once considered the most dreary day of the year. Earlier on New Year's Day, there was another feast for ears and eyes from another of the world's great cities, with the music of the Strauss family as played by the Vienna Philharmonic guaranteed to soothe even the heaviest hangover headache.

I took a cup of kindness or two in a favourite local hostelry with my brother and some friends on New Year's Eve, and very nice it was too. A lovely atmosphere, no rowdiness but good-humoured revelry and the shared experience of crossing the line of one year into another and singing Robert Burns' timeless lines once again while linking arms. I was glad to be there, in company and to think on the old acquaintance of the twelve months just past, which will never come our way again.


Yet I could just have easily have enjoyed the moment without any need for booze or food. What New Year's eve really represents, I guess, is our shared humanity, celebrating the succesful circumnavigation of both the mountains and the planes of this thing we call life through another twelve months. For some, it will have been a breeze, while for many others the year yet ahead will offer new challenges and not always of the enjoyable type.

Sadly, the turning of the year does not turn man from the worst of his ways,no matter how much we might hope for it. No sooner had the New Year begun in parts of the Southern Hemisphere, than the news brought horrendous stories out of Kenya, where disputed elections have stirred old tribal hatreds, rather than gladdened old acquaintances. The situation is very tense as I write, but can there be anything more obscene and against the spirit of the season than the loss of over 30 lives with the deliberate destruction of a church where some were sheltering from the violence around them.

It doesn't take long for joy to turn to pain in human experience, and yet there is always the hope, the promise, that the pain will end. All pain. All suffering. All death. Defeated! Not ultimately by act of EU or UN, despite the growing and welcome recognition in our digitised, globalised age that we must work together to solve those problems which we all face together as the Human Race. The challenge of Global Warming will surely be high on the international agenda again this year. And doubtless, every country will have different opinions on this and other issues affecting us all.

But national preferences, or at worst national prejudices, can never cause the world to move truly forward. That comes not from astronomical predictions or astrologer's presumptions, but from seeing the evidence and the promise in every human being that there is more to life than the counting of days. God knew this, when he chose to reveal himself to mankind two thousand years ago in a tiny baby. Two thousand years; but a blip in the long history of the universe but marking the most important event ever to take place in human history.

Christmas surely deserves its full twelve days of celebration, which is why the party won't actually be over, in the Western tradition at least, until Sunday 6th January, the feast of the Epiphany. Once again, our continental cousins seem to know how to celebrate this event so much better than we do in England, where for most it's just the occasion to pack away the decorations for another eleven months or so lest bad luck be brought upon the house.

Quite where such a weird superstition developed, who knows. Superstition defies logic and rational analysis, much as those of a secular mindset might say adherence to the tenets of religion limits the growth of our humanity and the true way forward through science. But they conveniently forget that one of the greatest scientists of all time, Sir Isaac Newton who was born today in 1643, was a man of deeply committed faith too. For him, to increase our knowledge of natural laws was to do God's work and and to increase our knowledge of him.

Science and Belief do not have to be constantly fighting, and neither should people. Is there not surely something very significant in that the guests at the birthday parties of Jesus Christ represented a very different view of the world to that of his own people? Contrary views can co-exist.

The shepherds who came to adore Jesus from the nearby fields of Bethlehem were considered by some in their society the lowest of the low. Who might be their equivalents today? Asylum seekers? Strange, isn't it, that the biblical account of Jesus's infancy includes a flight into an alien country, to escape the jealous wrath of a king. Later, when that king went the way of all flesh, the young child and his parents returned to the land of their birth, where they were visited by mystics and distinguished persons traditionally represented as three "kings". The served became the servers with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

The visit of the three kings is the wonderful story behind Epiphany. Of course, there are inconsistencies in the details, but does that really matter? Science too is full of paradoxes. It is though very appropriate that Epiphany should be the first feast of the secular year, and the last of Christmas. The time arrives to take in what it all means, and get working again in real life in real time. When Jesus is revealed to the magi, the secular world of time and place, evidence and senses, meets the other world of eternity and humility, and things unseen by any eye but even more wonderful than anything science can explain are glimpsed in the eyes of a child.

Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, is the reminder that Jesus came for all, not just a select race or races. He came to bring life in all its fulness to everybody. Now that's surely something worth celebrating- party on, at least til Sunday!