Sunday, 1/1/12
When I
was young the Catholic name for New Year’s Day was the “Feast of the
Circumcision of the Lord.” With teachers having trouble explaining that to
little girls, the Church switched to calling New years Day “The Octave Day of
the Nativity.” But, then, the Church gave up on celebrating octaves. That had
them settling on calling it “The Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God.”
Seeing
that we have a Gospel in which Mary reflects on everything in her heart, naming
the feast for her motherhood seems like a good idea. However, as Catholics we
have always been proud of the deep roots of our liturgies, so we don’t like our
feasts taking on new names.
We
should notice that New years is celebrated by all nations and peoples. It might
not hurt us to be in step with the rest of the world. Now, what all other
people celebrate at New Years is the creation of the word. Why shouldn’t we too
celebrate that?
Now when
those other people celebrate creation they don’t commemorate heaven’s making
everything out of empty space. Rather, they believe that there was always chaos
there, and creation consisted in heaven bringing order out of the original
chaos. That might sound foreign to us, but actually our Bible starts in the
same way. The opening line of Genesis is “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth
the earth was a formless wasteland.” The original Hebrew for “formless
wasteland” was tohu-bohu which sounds
like clothes being flung around in a dryer.
An odd
thing about the New Years celebration for all primitive peoples is that it consists
in acting out their own creation myths. All those people believe that heaven showered
the world with blessings on the day of creation. Their myths follow that up
with the story of the first people doing something awful, which is their
version of eating the forbidden
fruit. That caused the gods to run away, wanting to have nothing more to do
with sinful peoples.
Primitive
peoples act out their creation myths in the hope that they can make the gods think
they are back at the beginning when people were innocent. They try to trick the
gods into coming back, once again showering the world with blessings.
There is a little of that ancient
tradition in the second reading of today’s Mass when we plead to God to “let is
face shine” on us.
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