New Narratives

It has arrived: the first day of 2022. Why have I looked forward to it with such longing? Is it simply the notion of starting fresh, cleaning out the old and tired and worn? Is it that 2021 was a particularly disheartening year in a multitude of ways? Is it that a brand new year offers a greater-than-average chance that I will finally take seriously what has been kicking around in my brain: nebulous plans, ideas, first steps, commitments, attitudes, and determinations?

Dom Anscar Vonier, an English Benedictine priest who died in 1938, offers me a timely and welcome reminder:

There was a time when the world’s evil did frighten my soul, when I looked upon it with scared eyes and anguished heart, as if it were something mighty, with power and substance in it. But from the day when I began to understand your motherhood more clearly, [ever-blessed Mother of God], and to love it more ardently, my soul has ever made merry over the idle efforts of the princes of darkness to cow man’s spirits into timidity through their idle attempts at establishing a mendacious sovereignty of gloom. The Creator of the starry skies smiles sweetly at you, O fairest of all women, and you return his smile in triumphant peace, and I know that with God smiling at his sweet Mother the grim powers of evil are already defeated.

So, here on January 1st, I look back and see a year (nearly two) in which the world has been brought to its knees by fear porn and tyranny churned out as fast as the prince of darkness and his minions here on earth can generate it. I look forward and see shadows that make me think we will get more of the same, but, thankfully, they quickly get overpowered by streams of light promising a change of course and the freeing of minds that have been enslaved for far too long.

And what of the present? It brings contentment. That’s good enough for now.