In his New Year’s Day Sharp Edges column, Hanging the Year on a Mistake, Jim Taylor calls New Year’s a “crock.” Or more specifically, he calls the date – January 1 – for New Years “a reminder of our infinite capacity for self-deception.”
He concludes his piece by saying “New Year’s Day would make sense on December 21. Or on March 21. But the present date for New Year’s Day is utterly meaningless. It persists only because we humans refuse to admit that we occasionally make mistakes.”
It got me thinking about Meaning.
Not about the date of New Year’s. I agree that either the winter solstice or the spring equinox makes infinitely more sense as the start of the year, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere. And as someone who really needs the sun to shine in my living room window every day, and to stay up past 5PM, I vote for the former. I definitely celebrate when the days start getting longer. But the importance of a date has little to do with any fact-based, intrinsic reason for it. It has everything to do with the meaning that we attach to it.
“Meaning”, the kind with a capital “M”, is emotional, not logical.
Don’t believe me?
Try telling any literalist that heaven’s streets aren’t paved with gold. Or any atheist that there are questions that science, at least as far as human beings are capable of applying it, can’t answer. Or talk to any teenager whose boyfriend forgot their one month anniversary.
As human beings with an inseverable relationship with that Theos we call God, we know instinctively that life is more than just random chance. And we have an innate need to recognize its Meaning, even if we have limited ability to understand it. Hence the importance we place on the events in our lives, be they anniversaries or birthdays; or their converse, memorials or obituaries. Or yes, dates like New Year’s and traditions like the Nativity.
The “reality” of Jesus’ birth is that it’s highly unlikely to have been anywhere near December 25th. But Christmas in August?? A non-starter for most of us. It’s not that we don’t, logically, accept that the date is wrong.
It’s that the date doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that we need Meaning to be constant and unchanging.
Which leaves literalists making extreme leaps to “prove” the consistency of sacred texts that honest scholarship has long since shown to be mythos rather than history.
Which leaves atheists chanting the mantra of “objectivity” even as quantum mechanics demonstrates the interrelationship between observer and observation.
Which leaves others, disillusioned by the extremists of both “religions”, looking for Meaning elsewhere.
Like in the stones of a Mayan calendar.
The problem is not, as Jim suggests, “self-deception.” It’s that neither sacred text, nor objectivity, nor ancient Mayans, nor the date for New Year’s, were ever intended to be immutable. God has never expected us to live exactly as we did millennia ago, or centuries ago, or decades or even a year ago.
Carved stones, whether they’re covered with commandments or calendars, are no substitute for our living agapé relationship with the Creator. That relationship is the one thing that is constant. Unchanging but ever-evolving. Ancient but never archaic. Eternal but ever-renewing.
In Jeremiah and in Hebrews we’re told that there will be a time when the “Law” will be written “on our hearts and in our minds.”
This seems like as good a time as any.
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- Mayan ‘Doomsday’ in 2012? New Assurances (abcnews.go.com)
