Daily Reflection
January 1, 1999

Today’s a funny kind of a feast day. In our culture, it is mostly a secular feast: we make our farewell to the old year as fond as we can, and we give voice to our hopes for good things in the year now starting. We may even form resolutions we mean to follow in a life that needs some renewing. Today football, pageants, TV trays, and left-over-buffets take the center stage given a week ago to gifts, Bethlehem, and family feasts. After a week of family and celebrating, we may be turning quietly to thinking again of the work world. If we go to Church today, we may not be too clear what exactly it is that we are supposed to celebrate.

In the Church, too, several things come together on this day. First, it’s the octave of Christmas, a way of keeping contact with what we celebrated then. Secondly, it’s a feast of Mary: the Church ponders back over the Christmas event as Mary pondered it while she reared her new child. For Jesuits, it’s also their “titular” feast: as members of a community marked by Jesus’ very name, they celebrate especially on the day that recalls his naming.

That event helps focus my praying today. “Jesus” means “God saves.” If Advent has given me a gift this year, it is that God alone can save me and us--from death, from cynicism, from all the incarnations of darkness that forever threaten our lives. Like the Church looking back over Christmas’ gift and like Mary caring for her child, I do not want to lose touch with that Advent gift of knowing who gives my life hope. A life in which God saves me is so much more humane, encouraging, and adventuresome than one in which I try to save myself!

I’m afraid of resolutions, precisely because they depend on me, and my performance has often been disappointing. But hopes are a more human thing, and my hope for this beginning year is that I and we will let God do more of the saving of us that only God can do. That hope can give us a happy new year!