So how do we get from Mary the Mother of God to the celebration of the New Year? That is the task. Well from the Christian point of view, it is not so difficult. Mary raised a child who, according the Gospel of Luke, could die saying "Father forgive them for they know not what they are doing".

In other words, I would like to look a little bit at the Christian meaning of beginnings. The only real beginning for us is precisely rooted in the possibility of forgiveness, because the true attrition that goes on for us Christians, is a constant stream of betrayals, big or little of what we say we believe. It is not just that my body doesn’t work anymore, or my house breaks down... all those forms of dissolution are certainly important. But the biggest form of dissolution is this gradual erosion of myself by all these little betrayals. I have a history, in other words. And what forgiveness is, is not the elimination of that history but the fullest acknowledgement of that history. But it is also further assertion that that past is not going to be absolutely determinative for my future. And that is the most profound and extraordinarily important notion of forgiveness and the new beginning and so the New Year. We see all this realized in career of Mary’s child. (Dante called the Gospel of Luke the ‘Gospel of the Great Forgivenesses’. There are major examples of forgiveness which only appear in the Gospel of Luke.) So that is what forgiveness is. It is not an elimination, an ignoring of our history, as most of the New Year’s celebrations are. It takes our history absolutely seriously. That history cannot be wished away, cannot be imagined away, cannot be entertained away, it is there. But there is something beyond that event. There is a life.

I do not think that we human beings are very good at forgiveness. And at least in my case, it is not that I believe my history is going to lay like a dead hand on the rest of my life, but I know myself too well. I know how unreliable I am. I know that there is every likelihood that my past is not going to be just prolog to my future but is going to be a shaper of my future. I also know I will forgive but I won’t forget. That is my standard operating procedure. It is not just an accusation that someone makes at me but it is something that I say to myself as well.

I would like to propose that real forgiveness is possible only with God. How would that work? God who sees potencies beyond our own, but more importantly it is God who can animate those potencies, in a way we can’t. We are in fact, trapped in our own history. That is a certainty, a given of human existence, however energetically we may wish to leap over the past, pretend that it did not exist. The real transcending of my past is only possible in the light of that great line from the first Letter of John: "If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart". And only God is greater than our heart. To give us the vision that we are not pinioned by our past, that we can go beyond that; that God can also give us the capacity to do that: all that is entailed in forgiveness. And that is the possibility of a new beginning, yet a beginning that is absolutely connected to what has gone before. As such it is in the deepest and realest sense a new beginning. And Mary is party to the illumination of this possibility because of this terrific child that she had.