Why I'm So Excited about the New Year

A. I hate it when people post extensive quotations on their blogs. I hardly ever read them. I hate it even more when they post very short quotations on their blogs with little or no comment.

B. I am going to post an extensive quotation on my blog. I was reading Madeline L'Engle this afternoon, a woman who astounds me with her insight right down into the middle of my soul, and the peculiar way that God made me. 

It's funny how so much of my reading these days seems to have come down to me right from the mouth of God, right into my questions and my longings. Even if no one in the entire world ever understood me, God does. And I am so very tired of being misunderstood.

You know if you've been reading my blog, or my facebook profile, that I struggle with depression during the winter months. The short days seem to suck the life right out of me, and there are many times in the dark and cold when I am sad, or anxious, or afraid. According to what I just read, it isn't only Seasonal Affective Disorder or a chemical imbalance that is to blame. It is something so much deeper than that.

Madeleine L'Engle, from The Irrational Season:

A new year can begin only because the old year ends. In northern climates this is especially apparent. As rain turns to snow, puddles to ice, the sun rises later and sets earlier; and each day it climbs less high in the sky. One time when I went with my children to the planetarium I was fascinated to hear the lecturer say that the primitive people used to watch the sun drop lower on the horizon in great terror, because they were afraid that one day it was going to go so low that it would never rise again; they would be left in unremitting night. There would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a terror of great darkness would fall upon them. And then, just as it seemed that there would never be another dawn, the sun would start to  come back; each day it would rise higher, set later.

Somewhere in the depths of our unconsciousness we share that primordial fear, and when there is the first indication that the days are going to lengthen, our hearts, too, lift with relief. The end has not come: joy! and so a new year makes its birth known (2, my emphasis).

L'Engle is rather mystical, but then again, so am I. I have always been a big believer in new beginnings, in meaning that is transmitted to us through everything we see, everything we experience, everything we taste. God speaks of Himself to us in this. I am thrilled by the turning of the year, even if the rhythm of the days hasn't changed, or our circumstances, or our surroundings. It's a new year. All has been made new.

If you tell me that the turning of the year is merely symbolic, I ask you what a symbol is if not a representation of truth? I make no claim that every symbol is authentic, that it definitionally means what it claims to. On the other hand, the fact that we call something a symbol does not mean that it is not real, that it is imaginary by default. For a moment L'Engle helps me to understand why this is so.

She goes on to say something in the next paragraph that resonates with me this afternoon, something I have thought over and over again, but I'll save it for another day. This may be a week of quotations.