New Year’s resolutions run out quickly. (So do resolutions of all kinds—remember when this newsletter was going to be monthly?) So I figured January 19 was a good time to check in and bring you this Happy New Year’s message from Saint Rafael. By now, I hope, you’ve forgotten your promises to work out every day, to find time for that self-care routine you love, to reduce that pesky screen-time statistic. I hope you’ve forgotten these things because, as Rafael would say, none of them are God, and as such, we have no business being attached to them.
Without further ado, here is his diary entry from New Year’s Day 1937. Or at least, a rough draft of it.
It is the beginning of January in the year 1937. Today is the same as yesterday, and tomorrow will be the same too. For human beings, anyway, time passes . . . For God, there is no time. God alone endures.
A year . . . Just another year, as the homilist said this morning; a year that is a drop in the bucket of eternity. This past year felt like a mere instant to us. A year has gone by and we haven’t done a thing with it . . . but we are closer to God than we were. That is the only consolation we have upon considering the passage of time, or how we are passing away with it . . . I don’t know. I don’t want to belabor what has already been said . . . Do we even know what time is? . . . Then why bother?! . . . To some, a year is a lifetime; to others, it’s a mere flash of lightning, immeasurably quick . . . It doesn’t matter, it’s not worth thinking about . . . To me, it’s just a number.
We will keep on living. Our bodies will get older. Our hair will fade and fall off. Our whole being will get worn out. What is young today will be old and decrepit tomorrow . . . That’s what time is.
You won’t be tomorrow what you are today, and you aren’t today what you were yesterday. Everything changes. That’s what time does, it leaves nothing stable . . . What’s the difference between a year and a century or a million centuries? Time is not worth our attention.
There is only one truth, and that is God, for God alone endures. God alone is unchanging. Everything else is like the year that just came to an end . . . lies and vanity that die with time . . . time that is a drop in the bucket of eternity.
Happy New Year . . . Well, it will be if we are better people from now on and take less time to hurry toward perfection in loving God.
But it’s not the year that needs to be better . . . We are the ones who need to improve . . . We are the ones who really exist, not this new year . . . That’s just a number that lives in our heads . . .
Goodness, I’m doing economic philosophy now. God help me. And the Most Blessed Virgin too.
Welcome, 1937, whatever you may bring, for God is the one who sends you. What do you have in store for me? It’s all the same to me, for the Lord is the one who sends all that, too.
May He help me to serve Him better within your days and weeks . . . May He and Mary protect me as they have in previous years. When you are finished, may I be able to say not what I have said today—that I am closer to God in terms of the time left in my mortal life—but may I truly be able to say that the year 1937 helped me grow closer to God in terms of holiness, perfection, and true love . . . As for the rest, I don’t want anything that won’t help me do that. Everything else is just wasted time . . . and seen rightly, from the perspective of my conscience, I’ve already wasted enough of that.
Welcome, 1937, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Project Updates
My friend Megan got one of St. Rafael’s drawings tattooed and I am so over the moon about it I could faint. Can you put “my dissertation inspired a tattoo” on your CV? You know what, I don’t care, I’m putting it on there anyway.
My friends, the Daughters of St. Paul, are doing a Lenten email series based on the memento mori devotion. It felt in the spirit of St. Rafael’s reflection above to encourage you to sign up.
The reason you haven’t heard from me since October is because I’ve been translating like mad. I decided to end my dissertation “early” (i.e. with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in summer 1936) so that I can turn it in and focus on the book (which will end with Rafael’s death in 1938). You wouldn’t think that would make a huge difference, but he wrote 300 pages’ worth of stuff in the last two years of his life, I think specifically to troll me. Anyway, once I’ve written the introduction, I’ll be done with the dissertation part of this project—so I need you to pray for me to get that done!