What's in a (New) Year?

In this post, I address things that are, for some, a matter of religious faith from a historical perspective. This means saying things that are based primarily on evidence outside of religious tradition. This is not to suggest that anyone is wrong to see them as matters of faith; it is rather an entirely different way of looking at something, and is in no way a challenge to the view taken by any religious tradition as a matter of faith or theology.

Here we are, at the end of 2021, the start of 2022.

It’s been quite a year for all of us, and I don’t need to talk about why. Everyone will also have had personal tribulations, sometimes related to wider events, and some not.

What I need to say isn’t about this year, or next year, but about the very idea of a ‘new year’.

A Christmas Message (2021)

I don’t have a big, Quaker, theological post for Christmas this year (though I encourage you to look at Christmas posts from previous years). I have no Christmas-related written ministry to offer (at least, at the time of writing, that can always change unexpectedly). This year, I’m offering more of a personal message. Life, me, a year in review… well, we’ll see how it goes.

Recent history first. I went a bit quiet again, didn’t I? I won’t deny that any break is still harder for me to come back from, in terms of my mental health, weird (but apparently not unusual) topic-specific anxiety still holding me back a lot. The reason for the break, or at least a contributor to the length of it, is that I was actually physically ill again. Not my usual exacerbations of my balance problems or viral upper respiratory tract infections, either. No, shortly after my first in-person work since the pandemic started, I developed a chest infection. Bacterial. Possibly pneumonia, apparently, though that not confirmed, and if it was it was pretty mild (turns out there is such a thing as mild pneumonia, though such things are obviously relative). Either that or a pretty bad and tough-to-beat more conventional chest infection. I was laid out pretty badly, high fever, needed two lots of antibiotics to beat it (though the first lot broke the fever), and extremely low energy – mentally as well as physically – for a few weeks. I’m fine, now. My wife got a viral cough around the same time, so I suspect I brought home a viral lower respiratory bug and I got a secondary infection with it – it did take a little while for it to get productive in my case.