Having struggled through the New Year season with Covid, I make no apologies for delays in writing a few words for my readers.  For me and my wife, the virus has manifested itself as a streaming cold, a hacking cough and a high temperature and I realise that I have had little energy for writing over the past couple of weeks.  What I offer here is shorter than usual, but I trust my readers will be understanding as I try to get back to normal.

The word that sums up this season is simply the word ‘new’. I realised as I was thinking about this word that it is not one describing an objective reality. Something may be new to one person but not to another. The individual who has not yet seen an object or had a particular life experience is entitled to describe them as new on the first occasion when they are encountered.  While there are some things that are universally new to everyone, most ‘new’ experiences are only special to the individuals concerned.  This quality of newness, such as one marking an age milestone, is nevertheless very important to those involved.  The newness of marriage, parenthood, adulthood is something we commemorate and often share with others.  We recognise how important these new milestone events are in people’s lives.  By our joining in such celebrations, we help to emphasise how delighted we are to share an experience of newness in another person’s life.

Newness is not just about marking and celebrating these life milestones, whether those of other people or our own.  It also describes about a quality of living that sees the way that everything around us is constantly in a state of flux and change.  The world of nature allows us to live in a world of beauty and growth where we see constant change.  It is perhaps much easier not to notice what is is going on around us, how, for example, each day in the year has its own special quality.  The light of the sun in winter is of a different quality to that of summer.  Each season also has its own glory.  The changes and constant newness all around us are a constant source of delight and joy.  The one thing that is required to enter this world of delight is our readiness to pay attention.   It takes effort to notice the new.  Humankind has a regrettable preference for what is predictable and repeatable.  We thus find it easier to shut out anything not needed for the immediate task in hand.

The capacity to embrace newness in the world of nature by people is an attractive quality.  It makes us want to try harder to cultivate this appreciation or sense of wonder in ourselves as a way of honouring God as the creator.  There is a wonderful passage in Psalm 8 when the psalmist speaks of the ‘work of thy (God’s) fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained’.  If appreciating God’s beauty is to become an honoured part of our spiritual make-up, then we should probably take more trouble over it.  We would like to think that our recognition of the newness of everything around us, is indeed part of our Christian faith.  This may be the case, but it cannot be allowed to stand on its own.   To serve God merely by recognising his beauty in nature would be an in incomplete, even lopsided, form of faith. 

There is one further way that we are called to engage with newness.  Christianity sometimes involves deliberate activity.  We may see something that ought to be done and we determine in our minds to take the necessary actions to bring it to pass.  Knowing that the people around us have similar needs to our own allows us to make an effort to serve those needs when we can.  Every decision to speak a word of encouragement or support to another person takes courage on our part.  When we do it, it is a deliberate action and it is new in the sense that it has never happened before.  Our potential actions towards other people all have the possibility for good.   In this potentiality there is enormous hope for change, newness and even transformation.  Perhaps we make less effort for the people around us because we have started to get too used to them and take them for granted. Just as the view from our own front window becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it and take it for granted, so we so easily do the same with people.  To say that other people, even those closest to us, have so much more to be engaged with, is probably an understatement.  As with the seasons, the growth in nature and the beauty of light interacting with plants and animals, so the people around us, the ones we take for granted, have so much to appreciate about them.  It does, however, require some kind of deliberate attention or application to reveal what we should want to find in that that over-familiar, maybe even stale, relationships.  But if we believe that everything is capable of being made new, then we should give our full attention to areas of staleness in our personal lives.  To see what is new in everything and everyone around us is perhaps a truly Christian resolution for the New Year.

In Revelation 21, in a passage often read at funerals, the one seated on the Throne says, ‘Behold I make all things new’.  Exactly what is being made new in this passage needs discussion and interpretation and there is room for different opinions on this. Nevertheless the ideal of newness being a divine gift to replace brokenness, death and loss has a powerful resonance. In whatever situation we find ourselves in we are always in the need of newness.  The interesting thing is that such newness is always available if we truly look for it.  It is available in the world of beauty and nature, and this is a gift for all, regardless of any religious background.  But newness is also promised in our relationships.  As Christians we are expected to explore the possibility of new relationships.  Here we find the discourse of reconciliation, forgiveness and restoration.   These are words about newness that very much belong to the Christian narrative.  There is a great deal of hope to be found here.

The idea of New Year has a powerful resonance whether we are talking about a Christian audience or an ordinary secular one.  Both can respond to that idea that newness involves hope and possibilities for the future.  Christians have their own account about the content of their hope, but every human being can be drawn into a narrative of good things that are possible if we are prepared to make the adjustment to listen more carefully and pay attention to what is around us.   Newness in the world, in other people and breaking out of staleness and routine is part of the way that the world becomes changed.  When we see a changed world both in the world of nature or in relationships, things start to shift.  We become part of and begin to create a new and better world.   Somehow, we have begun to put into practice our participation in the changing of the world that God is still creating, the world where all things are made new.