Happy New Year! Happy New Year? What a start I’ve had.
After a grand and busy Christmas with family here, both local and visiting, a sleepy New Year’s Eve (neither of us made it to midnight, nor anywhere close), –and then The Bug. On January 4th, I joined a long line of coughers, sneezers, and other unhappy souls in Urgent Care, and since then I have been lying low taking (im)patient care of myself. So our Christmas tree still stands, fading and sagging, the longest it’s ever stayed up. However, the wreaths are down, most other decorations stashed. Many other deeds, holiday-related and not remain—no, beg – to be done.
So 2025 has had the most sluggish start I can remember, and a rather discouraging one at that. Everything seems mixed: I came on the Bird of Paradise this morning as I went to pick up my daughter to take her for a tooth extraction (hardly the happiest experience for her January). The blooms spoke to me, saying, well, be joyful anyway! Here’s color for you, lady!

And then, speaking of “blazing,” the fires in Los Angeles. We used to live in Pasadena so every street cited is familiar, we know people who’ve lost their homes, neighborhoods, and very poignantly, a friend who mourns the church he grew up in. Sure, churches and homes are at heart the people in them, but the buildings contain so much love and heritage, that I hurt for him and so many others. Also, the combo of firestorm and drought is what we all dread, as my general area of San Diego learned the hard way back in 2003 and 2007. Several times now, I’ve heard interviewees say “my supermarket’s gone” and I immediately get it: that local source, where your favorite checker greets you, or you pick up a chicken for dinner or cinnamon rolls for Saturday morning. Or you’ve responded to a text: “I just need one more ingredient!” And now the places are reduced to smoking blackened shells.
You wish you could say a magic spell and it would all disappear. “There, there, now, it’s all right, dear . . .”

Well, here’s my front door. And what’s this “spell” that’s been inscribed? That is, chalked. Chalking the door is an old tradition for the Feast of Epiphany and this one means, Christ bless this house in 2025. Christus mansionem benedicat. Declaimed, the Latin sounds like an incantation, even reminds me of Harry Potter’s Expecto Patronem—but I have no wand to wave. The initials C, M, and B also stand for Caspar, Melchoir, and Balthasar, the three kings who journeyed to see the infant Christ in the manger.
If there were ever a year when we needed blessing, 2025 is it — and how I wish something could have saved all those houses that have burned. But it didn’t happen, even as I chalk my own door and pray for all that transpires in my home, all who live and come there, and the year ahead. I am fortunate indeed.
It’s significant, though, that I learned about chalking the door from church last Sunday; I watched the service from home, something I’d never thought of doing before Covid imposed video worship. In her children’s chat, our minister explained the chalking practice as something we do in hope, to inspire ourselves and bring peace and joy to others. Perhaps the bird of Paradise blooms acted similarly outside my daughter’s place.
And I can use all the hope I can get right now. I’m angry and agitated at the changes in our country. It seems all too true that forces promoting arrogance, personal wealth, vast profit made at the suffering of others, and dire misinformation are running rampant. No, make that being positively encouraged. It’s horribly hard to remain hopeful in the face of deportation fears, America First, and what seems like a vast looking out only for Number One. The country I used to know and love, and still do, this country of huge potential and generosity, appears on the brink of terrible changes and I am sick at heart.
Benedicat, God, Christ, we need you. We need hope and concern for the other person; also we need our democratic institutions to speak truth to power; we need them even simply to hold.
Personally, starting off this blaze of 2025, I must hold onto the strengths in myself, cultivate them and pray, and at least for myself live as strongly and well as I know how. And work wherever I can to respond and give to others, maybe new opportunities will present themselves that I don’t now foresee. I need to mine and use all my creativity and energies.
Last Sunday, however, video church also meant that I missed an annual tradition I have to come to love: the Epiphany Star words. Every first Sunday of January, along with Communion, each of us takes a word printed on a star as a guide to the new year. You never know what you’ll get, these cards are drawn face down. Each names a virtue or pursuit or idea that we might learn from as we live with it through the year. To my surprise, however, mine came in yesterday’s mail.

So, officially, I have been given “strength for the journey.” Or strength for what purposes? What does it mean to have strength? What will I discover about it during the year? Perhaps I will find reserves I didn’t know I had. The tape visible here is because I stick these star words on the wall next to my bathroom mirror, so that I think about them every morning, and all day.
And strength is what I need for 2025. You, too?

Adding on January 20. Already I’ve drawn on that strength, or you might say, was surprised at drawing yet more. For the bug I mentioned as I began this writing got worse and I went to the ER and ended up being treated for pneumonia and a resultant atrial fibrillation. Now I’m back at home after five days in the hospital and marvelous care, feeling pretty much myself, but still taking it easy. I thank God for the strength and skill of simply wonderful nurses who took care of me, as well as well of reassurance I dipped into as I lived through those day. And I am thankful for healing.