Living in China, I find January to have a peculiar feeling to it. On the one hand, as in the Western world, January marks the official beginning of a new year. Thus, New Year’s Day is a fairly major holiday, probably more so than in the United States, where it pales in comparison with Christmas. In China, students and workers get a day or more off from school or work for the holiday and New Year’s greetings are sometimes given. On the other hand, because Chinese New Year—now called Chunjie (春 节-- the “Spring Festival”) in the Chinese mainland—still is the most important holiday of the year and marks the beginning of the new year under the traditional lunar calendar, January is in a sense still not the “real” beginning of the year (because the date of the holiday depends on the lunar calendar, it can occur on any date from, approximately, the middle of January and the middle of February). Moreover, in a Chinese university, like the one in Beijing where I teach, the end of the fall semester comes in January (not in December, like in the U.S.), just before Chinese New Year and the approximately month-long winter vacation. Consequently, I find myself rather busy finishing up grading for the semester and piling through the considerable amount of paperwork Chinese universities seem to require at the semester’s end.
Of course, the whole concept of the new year beginning in January is somewhat arbitrary—in ancient Israel and even in Europe, as I understand it, until a few centuries ago, the new year began in the spring (which perhaps seems more appropriate). Nevertheless, we as humans seem to need a sense of a new beginning—out with the old, in with the new! And yet, we often find that the new year soon loses its feeling of newness and freshness, as we often find ourselves still dealing with some of the challenges we faced in the previous year and facing new challenges. That is why we need to rely on Him for whom there are no beginnings or endings. Moreover, we need to realize that beginnings and endings are not always in opposition; sometimes they are linked. T. S. Eliot wrote in his late masterpiece Four Quartets, “In my beginning is my end; in my end is my beginning.” What I understand him to be saying is this: our births (our beginnings) lead to our deaths (our ends), and yet, our deaths (our ends) lead to eternal life (our true beginning, which shall have no end). Perhaps this is an appropriate thought to ponder at the beginning of a new year.