Well, it almost seems ancient history now (we're already two days into the new year over here), but I had a new year's eve worth writing about this time.You've heard me winge (whinge?) about the weightlessness of Advent in the middle of summer, and Christmas looked to be even worse, lost in the din of school holidays starting, beaches opening, the summer solstice (!), and the buying bacchanal of Christmas sales. It was starting to seem that the magic of Christmas I was pining for was in fact just the magic of the turn of winter: the pagan festivities on which early Christianity piggybacked in Europe. The great wheel of nature, nothing more. This was rather discouraging, as it made it seem that the hope one feels might really be in response to the solstice, and nothing to do with a babe in manger, the light of the world. (It might also be that there's a different kind of visceral turning brought on by the summer solstice. I do think our bodies are more attuned to these things than we quite realize.)
Lucky for me I'm attending a liturgically fastidious church, one of whose traditions is to celebrate Lessons and Carols not before Christmas as everyone else does, but the Sunday after Christmas, as is apparently proper and as most of the carols demand. This year that Sunday fell on new year's eve, so Christmas had a chance to fight back! And fight back it did, planting a flag on that most pagan of holidays, with a lovely service of carols and music, culminating in "Dieu parmi nous," the ending of Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur, whose glorious melding of birdsong and wondrously strange deep descending organ chords (representing "the living God descending to His people") fit right into summer, and hushed it into silent adoration.
And then, after a party, I found my way with a friend to Federation Square (which I've come to love, especially at night, when it looks like a computer-generated landscape, nearly transparent and mysterious) for the fireworks, which were all around us! I've never been surrounded by fireworks before, nor, in the aftermath, by half a million peaceful people flowing like great rivers through the streets of a becalmed nocturnal city. Impossible not to catch the energy of that moment, to dare to hope that that joyous peaceful energy will flow more freely this year, and bring joy and peace to the world.
