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Dear brothers and sisters, at the beginning of the new year, we want to thank God that he gave us also the time. Time is a gift from God, as we pray in the Psalms, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” We are created by God and put in a temporal, earthly existence in order to achieve, in obeying God’s commandments and loving him and our neighbors, eternal happiness through participation in God’s own life for all eternity. There is a very luminous assertion of the servant of God, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, which says, “Time is equivalent to what can be done or gained by it.” At the beginning of the new year, therefore, we wish that it be happy, because we know that there is no greater melancholy or sadness than to use time for any purpose but the Supreme one, which is the salvation of the soul.
Fulton Sheen says that through God’s incarnation, time has been sanctified and made a part of the redeeming work of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. He is the Lord of time and eternity. In the ancient liturgy, January 1 was the Feast of the Circumcision of the Child Jesus. This feast showed us and wanted to stress the corporal truth that God became a real human being, a man, a male. In this way, the divine child already shed a first drop of his blood, indicating that he came to redeem humanity through the shedding of his blood on the cross. The liturgical texts of that day speak, however, of the divine maternity of Our Lady in the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the new liturgy, January 1 is therefore the solemnity of the Mother of God. Both mysteries are inseparably united, that is, the very truth of the incarnation and the true maternity of the Virgin Mary, who became the mother of God since she gave birth to Jesus Christ, who is the second person in the Holy Trinity, the eternal Son of the Father. The same day, January 1, is also the day at which the incarnated God was given the name Jesus. It is for us a joy and consolation that we begin a new year of our life and that also human history enters into a new year under the invocation and protection of the two holiest names, namely Jesus and Mary.
St. John Henry Newman left us the following short meditation for the beginning of a new year. “All days are the beginning of a new year, but we have a special reason to place the first day in this time for the season in which it comes is the beginning of a new year because it is the beginning of a new revolution in this world’s course. The Earth is asleep, and I may say that as man’s extremity was God’s opportunity, when things are at their worst, they begin to mend. The sun stays in its downward course, and it turns back. The days become longer, the year awakens, and human thought and activity with it. Such is the wonderful world in which all is motion begins, goes on, increases, and dies again year after year, and man, in detail, day after day, goes on to his work and his labor till the evening. Change, such it is with us and with an end. But does it end? We pass in the course of 365 days, the day of our death, like walking over our gravestone, what does it end in? A state in which time ceases, or rather, time, it may be set, stops. Time in this world is marked by motion. Motion, or what is commonly called change, is the very fulfillment of this state of things. The end of the change, but the day will come when time brings with it no changes. Past, present, and future, because there is change, bring with it no changes when all is the same day after day, age after age, in short, when time stops. An eternal Now, these we call eternity. Time without change is eternity. Properly, time cannot stop. It runs on as I am speaking. There is nothing to end it, but as soon as there is no change in it, it is eternity. All our thoughts and ideas will stop. They will be fixed and one and the same, as they are good or bad, it will be heaven or hell.”
So, Saint John Henry Newman, at the New Year, we often hear the words of God’s blessing from the Holy Scripture. “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.” Pope Benedict XVI once spoke the following inspiring words for the beginning of a new year. “Dear brothers and sisters, is the foundation of our peace, namely the certainty of contemplating in Jesus Christ, the splendor of the face of God, the Father, of being sons in the Son, and thus of having on life’s journey the same security that a child feels in the arms of a loving and all-powerful father. The splendor of the face of God shining upon us and granting us peace is the manifestation of His fatherhood. The Lord turns his face to us, He reveals Himself as our Father, and grants us peace. Here is the principle of that profound peace. Peace is God, which is firmly linked to faith and grace. As Saint Paul tells Christians of Rome, nothing can take this peace from believers, not even the difficulties and sufferings of life. Indeed, sufferings, trials, and darkness do not undermine but build up our hope, a hope which does not deceive because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us. Amen.”