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January 9, 2021Happy New Year! As the Jewish people say, “L’Chaim!” To life!
I have a picture in my photo album, a picture taken in 1962. It has my grandmother, my mother, my sister and her first child. Two years later I remember my grandmother saying goodbye to my oldest brother and his family when they left for Hawaii, where the Navy assigned him. We asked her why she was crying, and my grandmother said, “Because I’ll never see them again.” She died two weeks before they returned home. Today both my mother and grandmother have passed on, and as my sister says, we’re next. That is the passage of life and time.
Time passes so quickly. It’s hard for me to believe I’m 70, shortly to be 71. It’s even harder to believe that 2020 is over. I don’t remember what I expected when 2020 began. I certainly did not expect it to be the bust it turned out to be. But undoubtedly it worked well for some few. Those are the breaks. Any year is good for some and not good for others. But as St. Paul wrote the Romans (8:28): We know that all things work for good for those who love God. Let us thank God for the good years and also thank God for the lessons we learn in the bad ones. My parents developed noble character and learned a lot of things during the Great Depression that served them very well in life.
Now it is the year of Our Lord 2021… 2021 AD. Some want to make it to be 2021 CE, meaning “common era.” How exactly did year 1 AD or CE become the starting point, the reference point for all of human history? Because year 1 (more or less) is when Jesus of Nazareth, Our Lord and God, was born into this world. That was a unique and most uncommon event. It changed history and the horizon of human life. Changing AD to CE doesn’t change that fact. It does make the point that as time has moved forward, the world has changed. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, all non-Christians have taken to use our system of dating as the world has come closer together through business, education, science, travel, electronic communications and international cooperation on every level imaginable. We are one world with one date. That unity is part of God’s plan.
But unity doesn’t happen all by itself. It takes hard work. A friend of mine in Turkey reminded me of something President Reagan had said in a speech to the UN in 1987: "In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." Periodically there is buzz in the news about UFO’s. Hopefully 2021 will not be the year we have hostile visitors from another world. There are enough home planet grown problems right here, like COVID-19, that we can and should solve by uniting and cooperating more.
None of us as individuals knows whether this will be the year we drop out of the picture, so we must live each day for the gift and blessing that it is. A new year is just 365 new days. We do not see what God sees, so any day could be the day we perform a good deed that will ensure the gate of heaven will be open for us, something we do for the least of our brothers and sisters. This year, others will come into the picture, born into the world as new born babes, like Jesus was, and join the human family. We must make sure 2021 is a safe year, a good year, for all of them. May it be a safe, happy and blessed year of Our Lord 2021 for you too.