31.12.2015
A New Year Message from the Archbishop of Dublin
If Christmas gives us a chance to grapple with darkness and light, then New Year gives us a chance to grapple with light and travelling. The Three Wise Ones travel from the East, they follow the light. They find themselves with the Christ–child in majesty, in adoration and in worship. All three of these are very healthy and very suitable responses to the rather miraculous arrival of a New Year. There is majesty in hailing a king; there is adoration in seeing the beauty in the child; there is worship in joining from afar those who are near to hand in celebration and song.
Whether you see in the New Year at home or away, with your family and friends or on your own, the arrival of a New Year asks of us that we recognize the wonder and the glory of the cycle of nature and the return of January. Often a New Year stirs up fear and anxiety in almost every one of us. Its very newness opens a window on a world that we have not seen like this before. How could we have done so? It is, after all, a new world in a New Year. God invites us to trust God, to trust our instinct, to trust ourselves and to trust one another. Trust in what is new and the fear will begin to recede and withdraw from your heart. Try your best to go to meet it and to bid it welcome. The new will change regularly and rapidly and you will teach yourself to use your instincts for trust and its sister suspicion wisely and carefully, for the protection of yourself and for the protection of others. And you will learn that trust has another sister named justice.
Travelling in the light and also travelling light itself are good things to do and to resolve to do from early in a New Year. They leave us ready to receive as well as ready to give. A New Year opens us up to such travelling in both directions in a way that is cold but fresh, challenging but welcoming, today for tomorrow.
I wish all of you a very happy 2016.
+Michael