Writing the Prologue to Your New Year
Reflection by Judith Valente
New Covenant Community Church
January 18, 2026
There is a scene in Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park with George” where the main character holds a drawing pad in his hands and says, “White, the color of a blank page or canvas. So many possibilities.”
Each new year is like that blank page or canvas that we get to fill once again with a story of our making. Each new year comes with a calendar of empty spaces, like the unblemished landscape of a fresh snow. The poet James Crews reminds us in his poem, “New Year,” that “Hope lives in the blankness/ of each new calendar square.”
I like to think of a new year as a mystery waiting to unfold. Not just any mystery, but a sacred mystery, one where God writes the plot line and we are the co-authors.
In a sense, we have been writing a mystery story since the day we were born – a mystery in which we encounter many characters and must solve many questions in the course of a lifetime. At the end of 2026, will we be able to say we wrote another satisfying chapter to our unfolding story?
There is a quote I love from a book called “Choosing Gratitude: Learning to Love the Life You Have” by James Autrey, someone who reinvented himself as an author after a career in business.
Autry writes, “We have the power to imbue everything we do, every relationship we have, and every day we live with meaning.”
We have the power …
It’s common to think of a new year as a time of resolutions. So often though the resolutions we easily make on January 1 are just as easily forgotten when March rolls around. Dorothy Day, as many of you know, was one of the great social justice and peace activists of the 20th century. Day co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement that operates houses of hospitality for the homeless and vulnerable across the country. She preferred the word revolution over resolution. For a revolution marks a fundamental change in the way we think about something and behave. Day talked about “a revolution of the heart.”
In a talk she gave in 1976, she said, “The greatest challenge … is to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us. When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers and sisters with that burning love which led to the cross, then we can say, ‘Now I have begun.’”
It appears as though that “revolution of the heart” is going to be especially necessary in 2026, which is already shaping up to be a difficult year. Need I remind you of the uncertain situation in Venezuela and the dangerous developing events in Iran and the threats our government has made against that country.
Or of the killing in Minneapolis of a young mother — an American citizen – by a masked, gun-toting immigration enforcement agent. Or the lies that our president and other public officials have told to justify firing three bullets at close range into someone who was unarmed and appeared to be trying, slowly, to drive off from a tense situation.
At this time, it appears much of what we can look forward to is more masked, heavily armed law enforcement agents in our cities. More soldiers in our streets. More chaos at home and on the international scene.
What then can be done?
The Japanese have a word, komorebi, that means literally “sunlight leaking through trees.” I describes how sunlight pouring through the leaves of trees, also casts shadows on the ground below. It is a metaphor for those periods in our lives that contain both darkness and light.
In another of his poems called “Light and Dark,” James Crews talks of learning to live with both the light and dark “held in the same container.” As James writes:
“Today I stand at the edge of both,
knowing that if I want to walk in the light
I’ll have to dance in the shadows too.”
We know where the darkness is. We’ve seen it already 2026.
And we must be the light. Can we learn to dance, as James puts it, in both the time of shadow and the time of light?
What else can be done? Something that helped me in 2025 – another tough year – was to keep a wonder and miracle journal. Miracles do happen, especially if we keep our antennae on alert. I love a recent Netflix series called “A Man On The Inside” with Ted Danson, who plays an amateur detective. In Season One, he goes undercover in a senior citizen home to catch a thief who has been preying upon the home’s residents. At one point, an elderly man in the home tells Ted Danson, “Everything in your life, looking back on it, feels like a miracle.”
It is a reminder that sometimes even a seemingly insignificant event or gesture, if it carries with it great kindness, can leave a huge impression, can feel like a miracle in someone’s life. Can we be the miracle workers in someone’s life in 2026?
Something else I’ve found helpful to do at the start of each new year is to select a word that will serve as my guiding star for the year. This is a practice that dates back to the third and fourth centuries when it was common for pilgrims to visit monks living in the Egyptian desert, and seek from them a word to take back to their ordinary lives. My guiding words change each year in relation to the events of my life. One year it was Persevere, another Adventure, another Mercy. Last year it was Revolution. This year it is Mystery, because I want to have the courage to always lean into the mystery that is my life.
I also like to write a letter at the start of the year, fleshing out what I hope will be the plot of my new year. What do I mean by that? A spiritual mentor once told me something that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “God isn’t a character in out lives. God is the plot.” The letter is not a to-do list or catalogue of resolutions. Rather it’s an attempt to flesh out what I want to be the story of this new year. This practice of writing a letter at the beginning of the year is a bit like the advice Steven Covey gives in his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Start with the end in mind. What is it you want to be able to say about your life when next January comes around, January 2027?
I find it’s helpful to write the letter in the present tense, as though all the things I want to happen in 2026 are already happening. So, for example, my letter might start, “In 2026, I am a more peaceful and gentle person, less prone to quick flashes of anger. I look upon my writing and speaking commitments not as burdens but as joys and opportunities. My writing is deeper and more meaningful than ever …” And so on.
Once I finish the letter, I fold it up and put it in an envelope and don’t open it again until the following year. Think of the contents of your letter as the ingredients in a cast iron pot holding all your hopes and intentions marinating throughout all the months of this coming year. Often when I open my letter the following year, I’m afraid I won’t have met my aspirations. Or that I wasted too much time. Inevitably, I see where the year did meet my expectations and then some. There is truth to the saying, “Write it down, make it happen.”
Today, January 18th is the time of the new moon. Throughout the ages, times of new moons and full moons have been considered fortuitous times. So, I encourage you to spend some time today on writing the plot to this new year.
I want to leave you now with a story from the Zen tradition that I re-read every year. I found it in a book called “Zen 24/7” by Philip Toshio Sudo. A story of the preciousness of life and the wisdom of not waiting to follow our soul’s deepest desires.
A man is being chased up a mountain by a tiger. To save himself, he grabs hold of a vine swinging over the edge of the mountain. Then below him, he sees a second tiger, growling up at him. At that moment, he notices two mice have begun to gnaw at the vine he is clinging to – the vine that separates him from the tiger that chased him to the mountain’s edge and the tiger waiting below to attack him.
The man then spies a luscious looking strawberry growing in the mountain’s soil. He plucks it and pops it into his mouth.
How sweet the taste! he says.
What is the lesson in this improbable story about a man on the verge of certain death pausing to eat a strawberry? Philip Sudo suggests it is this:
Why wait until death is near to taste life’s sweetness. Savor life now. If you treat each day as precious, each day as a lifetime, as the Zen saying goes, then each day becomes like that luscious strawberry.
Sudo adds: “Don’t wait until the car accident, the cancer diagnosis or the death of a loved one to get your priorities straight. Do it now.”
So these are a few thoughts on how we might write the prologue to our new year.
The poet Goethe once compared our life’s journey to that of a “drunker beggar on horseback.” What mattered, Goethe said, was not that the beggar was drunk and reeling, but that he was mounted on his horse, and however unsteadily, was going somewhere.
Sometimes steadily, sometimes unsteadily, we will stay mounted on our horse this new year. May each of us travel with trust. May we remain attuned to the miracles happening around us. May we be light in times of darkness. May we keep plucking strawberries. And may we write, in this new year, a great story.
Thank you for your kind attention. Let’s take a few moments of silence to reflect on these words we’ve heard.
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