The Anchoress

Photo shamelessly cribbed from Deacon Greg

To all my regular readers, visitors, lurkers, friends, unknown well-wishers and worthy opponents - I wish you a new year brimming with all good things, most particularly the gifts of love, friendship, good health, opportunity and quiet. I offer a prayer for your good, and for our president’s, our government’s and the world’s, and another for our troops in harm’s way and those they seek to protect, here and abroad. Thanks to them, the new year for Iraqis looks better than it has in decades.

I offer a bit of scripture for tomorrow, from the yesterday of Jeremiah:

For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare, not for woe! plans to give you a future full of hope. When you call me, when you go to pray to me, I will listen to you. When you look for me, you will find me. Yes, when you seek me with all your heart, you will find me with you, says the LORD, and I will change your lot; I will gather you together from all the nations and all the places to which I have banished you, says the LORD, and bring you back to the place from which I have exiled you.

If you’re thinking of making New Year’s Resolutions, well, I’m printing out this Daily Decalogue of Pope John XXIII, which looks to be challenging enough, and keeping it on the desk where I might actually read it and try to live it, some days. (H/T Patrick).

And a few words from Deacon Greg and his New Year’s Day Homily:

Mary, meantime, absorbs this, and makes of it a kind of prayer – keeping all these things, and in Luke’s beautiful words, “reflecting on them in her heart.”

It’s customary on this day to draw up resolutions – to make promises to ourselves and to others that probably won’t last until February, if they even make it to the end of this week. We resolve to lose weight or stop smoking or exercise. What it really means is that we resolve to improve the profit margins of Jenny Craig or Lucille Roberts.

Good luck with that.

But this January first, I would challenge you to make a different kind of resolution.

Resolve to learn something from the woman we honor today.

Resolve to dwell in possibility. Resolve to see every day, not just this one, as a fresh beginning. Resolve to welcome every blank page, every new start, with trust that God will see you through it – and then reflect on it in your heart. Just like Mary did.

Today we celebrate Mary the Mother of God – Mary the mother of our salvation. Mary, the one who gave birth to a new beginning.

Resolve to embrace what she represents. Resolve to count every day – and to make every day count.

Because “Today is where your book begins. The rest is still unwritten.”

How will you fill the pages of your book?

Safe New Year to all!

Sister Grace Helena begins her new year with a bang. What a pretty wedding cake!