New Year rituals – Feminism and Religion

And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Passing of Arthur,” Idylls of the King

It’s arbitrary, of course, this designation of January 1^st as New Year’s Day on the Gregorian Calendar, but it’s also unavoidable. Everywhere around us, people are gathering, celebrating, making resolutions, ringing out the old, ringing in the new.

The Jewish calendar’s Rosh Hashanah, near the Autumnal Equinox, always feels like the real New Year to me, with its time-honored rituals of renewal and return. The ancient Persian New Year, observed at the Vernal Equinox and recalled in in the Jewish and Christian celebrations of Purim and Mardi Gras, also moves me. And, like so many of my brother and sister pagans, I experience the Winter Solstice as a truly numinous moment, a time to release the past and welcome the future as the sun dies and is reborn.

This year, it’s especially meaningful to find Chanukah so close to the solstice, filling the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I’ve been lighting my candles each night with particular pleasure. Yet I’m happy, too, to join the rituals associated with the secular, popular New Year. In my view, there can never be too many moments of renewal and return.

Continue reading “This Time by Joyce Zonana”

Dear Friends,

Every year on New Year’s Eve, I read creation stories to my family. We light candles, sit in a circle, eat, drink, and read. This little ritual began as my protest to the vulgar commercialization of the New Year and the ponderous weight of trying to be/do/achieve something new every twelve months. Last year, I discovered, however that I felt like the ancient creation myths and the new ways of bringing in the new year messaged similar things. I wrote about it in my blog post from January 2015, committing to write my own creation myth to read this year. I like where it is going… even this little exercise is causing me to think differently about sacred literature. I am becoming Inspired, I gasp to myself, to write my own Scripture, my own sacred truth. Here’s what I’ve got so far. I hope you enjoy it. Happy New Year!

1 The beginning could not be reckoned in the time before time was reckoned. 2 For, what was had yet to know itself, and it could not know itself alone. 3 But, for its love, it could not be known. So it was that the beginning that could be reckoned was not the beginning but the beginning of loving, which was the beginning of knowing, which was the beginning of being. 4 And, in that beginning, a great ellipsis had already become of particle and light, and the particle and light thrummed through darkness forming a whole body. 5 Of the great ellipsis of particle and light, a body and a body and a body were formed, in and of the great ellipsis, thrumming through darkness. 6 The thrumming ellipsis pushed forward so far that its particle and light extended beyond itself and then beyond itself and then beyond itself, as though it were to separate, but it did not. 7 A whole body was formed, which was the beginning of the simultaneity of what was and what is and what will have been. Continue reading “In the Beginning by Natalie Weaver”