Longing in the New Year
Tomorrow marks the start of the Christian New Year. But this new year comes in not with a bang, but with a groan. Not with goal setting and a good decluttering, but with deep longing.
For centuries the Church has started another year of journeying through the gospel story together by carving out space for quiet, fasting, expectation, and leaning into longing for our hope to be fulfilled while we wait in darkness. The lengthening shadows of the changing season know what we in Christ sometimes have a hard time admitting: at times, the dark of night is longer, more penetrating than the day.
This may sound like a strange focus to begin a yearly cycle centered around enacting the gospel of the victorious and risen Christ. But without time to consider the depth of our need and the desperation of our current situation, we will have a feeble hope that cannot sustain in the darkest nights.
We need set-apart, sacred time to confess to God and to one another that the persistence of darkness and evil in our day is discouraging and devastating. That living in the tension of the present “already-but-not-yet” reality of God’s kingdom sometimes feels as though it might actually tear us in two. That waiting is hard. That all is not right in this world and that we ache to see him make all things new but that it all looks pretty darn bleak right now.
When we voice that longing to God together, it is an act of faith, not doubt. Our groans before him are uttered in faith that he not only hears, not only responds, but that he intimately knows that same sense of longing and bears it in solidarity with us. We remember anew that he is God with Us. So as we lift our eyes and watch for the Light with all the people of God throughout time, we watch with Christ who has bound himself to us and gives us his eyes to see our coming hope.
The ages-old persistence of that longing in every human heart invites us to keep faith that what we ache for will be satisfied. In this new year, we set our hope on Christ who has joined our lives to God’s story of renewal—renewal for ourselves, yes, but also for every vibrating, possibility-laden particle of this cosmos. And no darkness, no acts of evil, no unjust wars, no grief, no still-unmet longings, and no exhausted ability to muster up the imagination to see it can stop the Light of the Bright and Morning Star from dawning on the long night of our world.