Two-faced every January
Looking back, looking ahead, and a monastery photowalk
The month of January is named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, of doors, thresholds, and passageways. Janus is often depicted as having two faces looking in opposite directions — one toward the past and the other toward the future. It’s fitting then that we often take time in Januarius (“the month of Janus”) to reflect on the year behind and imagine the year to come.
If I’m honest, 2023 was rough. The hardest year in more than two decades, I reckon. I struggled with deep discontent. Like, soul-deep. I am an incredibly fortunate man, and my life is, objectively, blessing upon blessing. Yet last year I let all the things for which I should be grateful get crowded out by chronic dissatisfaction. I was thus in my head a lot too, and so present-but-not-present. I was often melancholy — but not the good melancholy (other Enneagram 4s will know what I mean) — and I was sometimes angry. Usually I was angry with myself, but loved ones got caught in the crossfire too.
I once heard a true story about a husband and wife who went snorkeling off the coast of Hawaii. They got so caught up in what they were seeing underwater that they didn’t notice the current had pulled them away from land. When they finally popped their heads out of the water they saw they had drifted dangerously far from shore. They were fortunate to have paddle boards with them and were able to make it back, but it took a long time and a tremendous amount of effort.
Maybe it’s because I turned 45, but it feels like last year I popped my head out of the water. When I looked around I realized just how far I was from where I expected to be at this point in my life. Many of the most important things — from being a husband and father, to my work, friends, and community — I didn’t seem to be doing especially well. It’s hard to describe, but I felt out of place, everywhere.
Also, I was doing only rarely some of the practices that, historically, have kept me anchored: walking, journaling, making stuff, and photography. Even writing. More than once my wife heard the self-pitying complaint, “I used to be a writer.” (Ick.) Those practices now felt like indulgences, done only by stealing time from something else more urgent.
Yesterday, the last day of 2023, I went up to Mt. Angel Abbey. For the first time in weeks, I brought a camera.
There was a thick fog on the hill, and the church was still decorated for the holidays.
The Abbey is an important place for me. I described it in Slow Church as my querencia, a bullfighting term that refers to the spot in the ring where the bull goes to rest and draw strength, a place to prepare for the next charge. Did I draw strength at the Abbey yesterday? Am I ready to charge into 2024? Maybe not. But it was a pleasure to wander around for a couple hours, to notice things, and take a few snaps. (I’ve put a gallery of photos at the end of this post.)
I don’t know what to expect from 2024. If this [*checks watch*] is my mid-life crisis, it is, ironically, no respecter of calendars. Today, January 1, feels a lot like yesterday. And to return to my earlier metaphor, I’m not even sure whether I should paddle back to land or let myself be swept away into something new. Is it time to fight for old dreams, or let them die in the hopes that some new ones will come along? I honestly don’t know. Maybe, Janus-style, I’m in a threshold moment. If so, it’s one of the uncomfortable ones.
What I’m quite confident in is the need to reclaim as essential some of the practices that I downgraded to the level of extravagances: writing, walking, photography, etc. I’ll be talking more about how I plan to do this in a post later this month.
No matter what, my prayer for the new year is for equanimity (a word that literally means “even mind”), to learn how to be content under any circumstances.
In 1839, John Henry Newman, then an Anglican priest, preached a Christmas homily on equanimity. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,” Newman said, quoting the Christmas story in Luke 2. Then he asked his audience to consider the ocean depths, how the fiercest storms on the surface don’t disturb the water far below. So it is with the saints: “They have a well of peace springing up within them unfathomable; and though the accidents of the hour may make them seem agitated, yet in their hearts they are not so.”
This is what I aspire to, though my storms are on the inside.
The Christian, said Newman, “has a deep, silent, hidden peace, which the world sees not...What he is when left to himself and to his God, that is his true life. He can bear himself; he can (as it were) joy in himself, for it is the grace of God within him, it is the presence of the Eternal Comforter, in which he joys.”
The end of Newman’s sermon is so good that I’ll use it as my conclusion too:
May it be our blessedness, as years go on, to add one grace to another, and advance upward, step by step, neither neglecting the lower after attaining the higher, nor aiming at the higher before attaining the lower. The first grace is faith, the last is love; first comes zeal, afterwards comes loving-kindness; first comes humiliation, then comes peace; first comes diligence, then comes resignation. May we learn to mature all graces in us;—fearing and trembling, watching and repenting, because Christ is coming; joyful, thankful, and careless of the future, because He is come.
More photos from my Mt. Angel walk. You can click on the images to see them larger:
