December

And so we come to winter and the dying end of the year. It has been a long travelling, as Eliot might have said, and at the end of it, a confusion of outcomes and a profusion of alternatives. What do we do, as year succeeds to year? The answer of the ancients was a simple one; they laid up stores, hunkered down, and waited till the new year had really started. (For many of us, this will be on 20th January, when finally the long drawn-out lack-of-government in Washington comes to an end.)

But this year has always been redolent of the fin-de-siècle. Again and again, that French phrase connoting the end of an era and new hope for the future seems to come up. At the same time, one thinks of Zeitgeist and Aufklärung; one thinks of light and clarity and time and spirit and how mankind does tend to screw it up.

The last time things felt this way was probably on 22 January 1901, when Victoria of England died. That will have been 108 years ago, when Barack Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States of America, that entity that began as a group of British colonies way back in the 18th century.

This, then, is a December of the world and its times. Old things have passed away, and looking forward in faith, we hope that new things will come that are not old things repackaged. If faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the change we want is change we can believe in, then we should really open up the armouries of the soul and the arsenals of the heart for our assault on the present darkness. God be with us.