Consider Jesus, Our Feast
New Year’s Day is just another midwinter day, but it marks the progress of time and prompts us to reflect—maybe on the passing year, maybe on hopes and expectations for the coming year. In our New Year’s reflections, I think it can be easy for us to partake of a belief that is unhelpful to our souls, but fills the air Americans breathe: we must make something ultimate of the new year . I’m struggling to find words for the belief I’m trying to describe, but I hope you can feel what I mean. Though most people don’t talk about this belief in these terms, it can feel like a new year impresses on us a burden that could be described as … saving ourselves or producing something profoundly meaningful or achieving some purity or righteousness, … especially by means of self-discipline or work. That’s a belief that flows naturally from the American culture’s secular, pluralistic civic religion. It isn’t polite to talk publicly about truth, goodness or beauty, but there stil...