Finding the Good News in the New Year

The late Peter McWillians’ seems to have had it right when he said: “The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news… and it’s not entirely the media’s fault, bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.” 

It’s sad but true. 

The prophets of foreboding are now perched on their fence lines of doom, warning us to tiptoe into the New Year, urging us to creep into hovels for our safety, for indeed the sky is falling: “Watch for the worldwide slowdown in the economy to accelerate into a depression, more catastrophic than ever imagined.” “Look for a prolonged shut-down of the government this year.” “Social Security will collapse sooner than anyone thought.” “Another pandemic is about to erupt with Mt. Vesuvius effects.”

Wait a minute. Instead of getting sucked into the vortex of ominous predictions, why not turn a listening ear to the possibility of good news this year? 

I stare at my complimentary 2023 Norman Rockwell calendar, compliments of my favorite financial planner, my son at Edward Jones. And I wonder, “What happened to that world? Was it ever really there?” 

But if you go back and read the newspapers in Rockwell’s day, you will find bad news there, too, for bad news is generational. It’s just that Rockwell, whether you consider him an artist or merely an illustrator, had a knack for taking everyday life scenarios and depicting them on canvas. I am no art critic. Yet even I know that any successful artist must be able to see what others miss. Somehow those seemingly ordinary events were captured by Rockwell’s eye and depicted in a homespun, attractive way.

This year, why not see through the bad news that will always be there and instead try painting some good on the canvas of your soul? Why not declare yourself an artist of sorts, one with an eye for the good and hopeful?

Just how does that happen? 

A seventeenth-century French Jesuit priest named Jean-Pierre de Caussade gives us a clue. As far as I know, he never painted a picture, but he was a craftsman specializing in soul care. De Caussade was appointed the spiritual director of a Jesuit retreat house where he undertook the spiritual development of the nuns. They wrote down what he taught them; years later, those notes were published as a book, The Sacrament of the Present Moment.(If you teach, it’s frightening to think your legacy could lie in the notes your students take.)  

De Caussade taught that God speaks to every individual through what happens moment by moment. 

How is this done? De Caussade said that “the only condition necessary for this state of self-surrender is the present moment in which the soul, light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child, responds to every movement of grace like a floating balloon.”

Why not try it, starting this New Year? Live each day in the present moment, mindful of the Lord’s good intentions for you, willing to obey Him, and thereby seeing through the obvious bad to the possible good. 

“Ok, fine,” you skeptically acquiesce. “But what about the bad moments we will inevitably encounter this year?”

De Caussade was well aware of that, too. He points to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the example of how to apprehend the presence of God even in ugly circumstances, for what could be worse, he maintained, than watching your son being crucified while the world laughed at him? We don’t deny the pain but “leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence…” and “give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.”   

From the stable to Calvary, from Advent and Christmas to Lent and Easter, and all the ordinary times beyond, it may not always be easy to find Him. Still, the artist in you can see through, even getting better at sensing His presence and painting the picture in your life. After all, His love is finding you. 

And that’s good news for every day of 2023.