Happy New Year!

I haven’t felt much like writing this week.  With opening a new location with untrained subordinate help and fighting a cold that won’t go away (Thanks, Lily!), it has been a struggle just to get through the week.  But I’m home (long enough to do laundry and greet the family when they come home from their celebrating at the cabin tomorrow), and it is New Year’s Eve, the last day of the calendar year.  I want to end 2011 the same way I started it—with an entry in my blog, no matter how sick and tired I feel.  

This is a time when many of us are called to reflect on the year now ending, and our plans for the year about to begin.  New Year’s resolutions are a common undertaking, with self-made promises to get more exercise, eat healthier food, do more reading and watch less TV, do more volunteer service, be more charitable to people we encounter, and pray more frequently.  And for many of us, these promises are short-lived and do not significantly change our lives.

The timing of this secular event doesn’t match exactly with our Catholic liturgical cycle.  Advent marks the beginning of the Church year, but the first Sunday of Advent comes six weeks before New Year’s Day.  However, as the readings remind me, we are still in the season of reflecting on what the next year will bring on a secular basis and what my actions portend for me on a spiritual level.

John’s letter (1 John 2:18-21) reminds us that we live in “the last hour” (New Year’s Eve) and that we are drawn in our daily lives to move in many directions, not all of them good for us.  For me, this reminder that we are in a “last hour” invites reflection on where I am at this moment, and what paths I have followed in the past year.  When I do I can see that I haven’t always done what I set out to do a year ago, I haven’t always stayed on the road I intended to take.  It isn’t always easy to recognize the “many antichrists” that surround me, and I am confident I am guilty of unintentionally following some of them in the past.  But being aware of where I have strayed from the road I want to travel is one message I take from this epistle.

John’s gospel (John 1:1-18)  dovetails nicely with the epistle – tomorrow (New Year’s Day) is a new beginning and in that beginning is Jesus, who has been in God since the beginning.  So as I reflect on the wrong directions (the “antichrists”) I have followed in the past, I can plan mid-course corrections by renewing my focus on following the teachings of Jesus in the coming year.