There are during the Christmas season moments of quiet. They are important. Christmas is full of joy, family, turkey, chocolates, gifts and good times. It is also, as you know, place of reflection. We do allow ourselves to stray into that time warp where we meet “the ghost of Christmas past”. In those moments there is always as well a hopeful look forward. We know we humans are much flawed and we know in our souls that we want to do better. It is almost a prayer.

There is a new year stretching out before us and the hope is that we will improve in whatever the human quest might be. It is difficult to articulate the concept but it is real.
In story and song that vision of “a better tomorrow” takes various forms. Sometimes it is formal New Years resolutions. I never did that in my adult life anyway but there is still that vague notion that we can have a “do- over”. We can be better. That idea is reflected in the ideas from childhood on up through a cold and clear January morning this year.

It reminds me in a way of school days and the first day of classes in a new school year when we all had bright and shiny new exercise books. They weren’t yet marred by ink stains and gravy smudges. They weren’t full of scratched out answers yet. They were neat and clean and full of promise. Now, I speak of the upscale lined exercise books with clear white lined paper. The letters MSS were on the slick cover. I think the letters mean “manuscript” but that may be an urban myth. They weren’t the old Caribou “scribblers” with the times tables on the back either. The paper in those Caribou scribblers was dirt cheap. If you used an ink pen the letters would blot. They were “budget basement”. The new “exercise books” on the other hand were different and they were representative of a new beginning.

The first thing you did with those books in the religious environment of a Catholic education was write the letters JMJ at the top of the first page. It was an odd thing to do. Those letters stood for “Jesus, Mary and Joseph”. It was a kind of prayer that asked assistance from “the holy family” on your work although Jesus, Mary and Joseph never wrote exams for me or slipped me correct answers. My success or lack of it seemed to be directly related to the effort I put into schoolwork rather than letters I wrote at the top of the page.

A variation on that mysterious quasi -religious practise was the business of writing the letters AMDG at the top of page one. Those letters stood for the expression “Ad majorem Dei gloriam which translates to “the greater , honor and glory of God.” It was the motto of the Jesuit order. Latin was big in those school days. Remember Gloria in Excelsis Deo ? I look back now, and I marvel that young students were appealing in Latin to a force that would help us do better. Imagine that!

So, it is we line up now at a new starting line as the calendar page that says ‘December’ falls to the ground. It makes me feel good. There is a nice tone to it that rings in our souls. It doesn’t mean we are going to actually be better but there is a sense that we might try. It will be like a new exercise book with clean pages. This book will be marked ;2025. There is a spiritual hope in that, and it isn’t really that far from the surface.

You know at Christmas there are moments, particularly late in the season, when it grows strangely quiet. That is an odd thing but, in the excitement, and even within the “madding crowds” and the malls and this “world of purchase” in which we struggle there is a quiet time of the soul that creeps in. It is a place of reflection that can be argued to come from somewhere spiritual if not downright holy. It is the new exercise book. You don’t have to write JMJ on it, but you can enjoy its freshness and its promise of a better tomorrow.

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]