New Year, Sobriety and the Work

Happy New Year!

Like everyone else in the Work, I find the New Year a convenient reference point from which to look at the past year and make Aim for the year to come.

The actual date of the New Year has no spiritual or religious significance. It's just the date that Julius Caesar would best suit the start of the new year, because January was ruled by Januarius, the god who looks backward and forward at the same time.

Astrologically and astronomically, we are still celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas, with Twelfth Night, the end of the concentrated period, falling on January 6th. In England - though not in many other countries - most of us still keep the tradition, even if many celebrants don't understand why.

January 6th, Twelfth Night, is the Feast of the Three Kings (or Magi, or Wise Men). It's also known as the Epiphany, the showing of the newborn Christ child to the representatives of other countries and older religions. The Magi, who seem to have come from Persian and Babylon, and who I believe were members of the Sarmoung Brotherhood, realized that a new Sacred Messenger had been incarnated, and were keen to be among the first to greet him.

In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Protestant reformation took greater hold than in England, and Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans saw the celebration of Christmas as a reversion to pagan practices. They therefore forbade it, and armies of men would scour the countryside on December 25th, putting out any fires that had been lit in manor houses or cottages - because such a fire might be used for cooking a Christmas pudding! The celebration of Christmas was banned, but the inborn need for human beings in the northern hemisphere to enliven the long, dark nights of winter remained, and the parties and revels were simply transferred to New Year's Eve, or Hogmanay.

England was a little different, however, and we never really adopted this extreme form of Protestantism. Catholicism remained a potent force, even when outlawed, causing the Church of England to adopt many Catholic practices at the same time as it denounced "Papism"! And among the traditions the English refused to abandon is the custom of Twelfth Night. Most English households will keep their Christmas decorations up until January 6th, and continue to enjoy mince pies, Christmas cake, and even Christmas pudding, which I absolutely love but discovered that hardly any Americans did. Perhaps you need English DNA to appreciate it.

New Year falls towards the end of these twelve days. It's a good time to take stock of one's life, and to consider one's Aim in the Work. Setting a new Aim for 2016 is strongly recommended.

I almost never made it to this year. My first New Year's Eve in sobriety stands out in my memory as a huge struggle, one which separated the past and present quite radically.

My lover had come to visit me, armed with a large stock of beer. He thought we could drink our way through it, and then celebrate the New Year with the rest of his family. But I was horrified. And very torn. I'd stopped drinking six months previously, but faced with this huge temptation I wasn't sure I could hold out.

Euphoric recall kicked in, and the beer bottles looked tempting. I could smell the aroma as he opened the first bottle, hear the little fizz of foam, saw the dewdrops forming on the ice-cold glass.

But I'd already begun to live the AA Steps, and I knew with certainty that if I were to drink, I would die. Not at once, perhaps, but quite soon after I picked up that first drink. I'd lose control, lose my sobriety, lose my life.

And no relationship, no temporary euphoria, was worth that cost.

So - with tremendous reluctance, and with tears in my eyes - I asked my lover to leave, and to make sure he took the beer with him. Then I got into my car and drove myself to the nearest AA meeting. There are always plenty of meetings on New Year's Eve, because it's such a large temptation for alcoholics, and fortunately there was one near me.

And I went to bed sober.

Every New Year's Eve since then, I remember that night.

And every New Year's Day I think about what my Aim is going to be for the year to come. I look back over the past 12 months and take a mini-inventory. What were my greatest trials, and where do I need to place most effort in the year ahead?

Marian always encouraged us to keep spiritual journals, and I've found this highly beneficial. We can look back over many years' worth of efforts and observations, and we generally find the same sort of trials, the same sort of temptations, running like a red thread through the journal.

But it's not quite a repeat of each.  The spiritual life is like a spiral, not a circle. Yes, similar situations recur, similar types of people - if not the very same people!- provide us with challenges. Our Second Force is never exactly the same, but it will take the form each time of something we deeply need to overcome, situations and temptations from which we can learn.

If you haven't kept a spiritual journal before, now might be the year to begin. Write your aim on the first page of the first entry you make. When you look back a year from now, it's sure to be enlightening.