I gaze again at the flickering flame of a candle as I begin to write this blog now that I am home again from the North.  But the candle isn’t in a glass bowl with a Christmas design. The bowl has been put away with my other decorations for next Christmas. The tree has been packed away too. My lounge always looks so empty when it has been stripped of the seasonal decorations, like a shivering beggar in the snow. For once Christmas is over, the atmosphere becomes chilled and only warmed briefly by New Year’s Eve celebrations. Yet the hope which Christmas proclaims is still there to lead us into the New Year, however bleak the prospect might be, however apprehensive we might feel, however uncertain the future might seem for our country.

New Year is the traditional time for resolutions. As the year changes, we are encouraged to make some changes in our own life, sometimes even towards adopting a new lifestyle. Very often these resolutions dissolve by the end of January! Perhaps one of our resolutions, in the light of Christmas, might be to try to hope more, to adopt a more positive attitude to the future. That involves stepping back from our fears or anxieties so as to see the future more clearly and therefore inevitably more positively. ‘Physician, heal thyself’, I say to myself. For  I am a bag of fears. I always see the glass half empty rather than half full. So one of my resolutions shall be to hope more.

Hope involves having faith in yourself, having confidence in your own talents and powers realising you have the ability to cope with a situation that may be stressing you or making you anxious.

Ultimately the human spirit has the ability to persevere, to endure. Especially in situations which are out of our control.  ‘Pour on, I will endure’ shouts Shakespeare’s King Lear to the storm that rages around him on the heath, after he has been made homeless by two of his daughters. Through his perseverance and endurance, having shed his kingship, his mind in tatters, he learns to be himself. Perhaps that is where New Year resolutions should lead us to: to be more ourselves or even to discover ourselves.

Marcus has an interesting way of coping with difficult or stressful situations or people: ‘Say to thyself, at dawn, Marcus: today I shall run up against the ungrateful, the busy body, the over-bearing, the deceitful, the envious, the self-centred. All this has fallen to their lot because they are ignorant of good and evil.

But I, understanding the nature of the Good, that is fair and the Evil, that is ugly, and the nature of the evil-doer himself –  that he is my kin – though not of the same blood  – but sharing intelligence and a spark of the Divine- can neither be damaged by any of them nor can be angry with my kinsman or estranged from him.

For we have been born for co-operation, as have hands, feet, eyelids and rows of upper and lower teeth. Therefore to thwart one another is unnatural and we do thwart one another when we show resentment and dislike.’      

Marcus, the powerful Emperor makes a resolution to see the difficult person as a fellow human being, as a sharer in their common humanity, a ‘kinsman’. This is an amazing act of humility for one so powerful. But then, as an American priest once said to me, when I was a student, ‘You can be the President of the United States and still have personal humility.’ No comment!

It is interesting that Marcus makes this resolve ‘at dawn’, as if he is making this resolution every morning. So perhaps our resolutions should not just be a New Year thing but an daily commitment. Then we might achieve those changes.  We might even change our attitudes towards others, as Marcus tried to do. We might see the day differently. It might go better than we imagined.

One of the first monks was a man called St Antony who lived for many years as a hermit in the desert in Egypt in the 2nd Century. He was a wise and holy man and many people travelled to him for advice and he became known as the ‘spiritual doctor of Egypt’. Antony lived to be over a hundred year old. Every day, even as an old and wise man, he would start by saying ‘Today I begin.’  

Today we begin.

Happy New Year, my dear readers.

Ave atque Vale until the next blog.

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Neilus Aurelius