Stop Year-Bashing and Start Thanking God!

               Traditionally, the month of December is associated with a litany of joys: Advent season, Christmas celebrations, time spent with family, snow (if you’re into that sort of thing), and thrice-daily screenings of Home Alone 2. However, in recent years, December—particularly its second half—has proved ground zero for an all-new, entirely miserable tradition which unfortunately appears to be rapidly rising above the rest of the holiday-crop: year-bashing.

              A quick Google search tells me that I’ve coined the term “year-bashing,” but if being a millennial has taught me anything, it’s that the internet is a vast ether of strange thoughts, and there is likely no such thing as an original idea. So, I’ve probably stolen this term from someone. Regardless, allow me to define “year-bashing” on my own terms. It is the act of denouncing the culminating calendar year as a 365-day tragedy, based entirely off of a laundry list of external factors. These may include, but are not limited to: the identity of the sitting president of the United States, the amount (and prominence) of celebrities who have recently died, the amount (and magnitude) of natural disasters experienced throughout the year, any personal misfortunes or hardships faced, etc.

                Now, qualifying years as “good” or “bad” is not a new practice. I’ve surly done it before. The year I made my first vows as a Franciscan friar and moved to Washington, DC to begin seminary? Good year. The year I spent in seventh grade pretending to be the oft-forgotten twelve-year-old member of Blink 182? Bad year. Connoting units of time (such as years) with qualifiers such as “good” or “bad” is natural, as human beings have an innate tendency to categorize experiences based off of dominant memories and emotions. This is normal, and should not be confused with year-bashing. When I refer to year-bashing, I am describing a phenomenon that is entirely linked to the cultural prominence of social media. It is an action that takes place in an echo-chamber, involving thousands (or even millions) of individuals linking like-minds in order to collectively diagnose a concluding year based upon a communal set of grievances.

                What is the problem with this? Simply put, year-bashing perpetuates a hive-mind of negativity, hopelessness, and ingratitude. Year-bashing leads to regrettable moments such as the recent firestorm of anger directed towards American singer Taylor Swift, who was ridiculed via Twitter for having the alleged gall to proclaim that she “couldn’t have asked for a better year,” and for thanking her fans for their birthday wishes. Year-bashing makes it okay for people (especially young people) to believe that, in a world where evil is a sad but present reality, there is nothing that can truly be celebrated—there is nothing for which we can be thankful. Year-bashing says that perceived racism, intolerance, or any variety of mismanaged social issues render an entire 365-day period null and void. Year-bashing says that, for as long as a certain man inhabits the residence on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, all of time is basically just a big drag—a period to be used solely to complain and whine and wait for “better days” ahead.

                And this is when I have to ask myself and my fellow millennials: What better days? If we are willing to allow external things like the death of Tom Petty or the Charlottesville riots determine how we feel about our lives, how can we ever expect to live with any amount of joy at all? It seems to me that there are no few amount of people out there who are quick to blame a specific person or a specific event for their anxiety, depression, or overall lack of contentment. How can we hope to achieve happiness if our happiness presumably hinges upon such a narrow set of idealistic circumstances?

                Praying about this conundrum one morning, I found myself calling to mind the example of canonized Franciscan friar and holocaust martyr, Maximillian Kolbe. Ordained a Catholic priest in Poland in the years preceding World War II, Kolbe ministered in his Nazi-occupied country by operating a temporary hospital, publishing anti-Nazi pamphlets, and hiding refugee Jews in his community’s friary. When he refused to cease acting as a priest, he was sent to Auschwitz. There, as a prisoner, he was famously martyred when he voluntarily took the place of a man whom guards had chosen to execute as punishment for another inmate’s escape. Condemned to a starvation bunker, Maximilian Kolbe lasted more than two weeks, supernaturally resisting starvation and dehydration while spending hours in prayer to Jesus and Mary. Ultimately, Auschwitz guards executed Kolbe with a lethal injection, as they needed the bunker empty and could no longer stand his unwavering courage, optimism, and hope. In the days before he died, however, eyewitnesses recount that Kolbe would spend hour on his knees, eyes to the heavens, singing Marian hymns with all of his being.

               What a wonderful story! But what, you may ask, does it have to do with the regrettable practice of year-bashing? To put it bluntly, I believe that I was called to remember the example of St. Maximilian Kolbe because it stands as a direct contradiction to the perennial display of bleakness and anger found at the end of recent calendar years. While Kolbe’s story is beautiful, it is not unique. The entire Gospel of Jesus Christ is based off of the idea that we should no longer seek to find joy in the things of earth, but— as St. Paul suggests—to fix our eyes on things above. This is not to suggest that a good Christian transcends the world and rejects the flesh in a clumsy act of dualism, but rather that a good Christian embraces his or her divine purpose in this world, while still recognizing a higher calling and rejecting anything that represents a hindrance to that calling. Christianity is rife with examples of men and women who have acted in this way, setting aside all external conditions and looking upward to the joy that comes through faith in God alone. Just as the early Church could not flourish without the blood of the martyrs flowing as a result of widespread persecution, Saints throughout the ages have almost always found their path to God via the maintenance of a radical hope even through the most difficult of times. For younger men and women, the excellent witness of Pope St. John Paul II is still fresh in mind. Having lost both of his parents and three of his siblings by the time of his twenty-first birthday, and struggling to attend underground seminary courses in Nazi-occupied Poland, the young Saint would have had any number of reasons to proclaim “#WorstYearEver.” However, he never did that. And it wasn’t because he didn’t have access to Twitter. It was because, in his heart, he believed that his faith in God could overcome any external hardships. And he was right.

                

            As our society loses faith in God, it becomes easier and easier to see how year-bashing is not just a fad, but rather a tradition with a whole lot of staying power. After all, if our joy does not come from things beyond this present world, then it will become all too easy to allow our current circumstances—serious or trivial as they may be—to shape our lives.  And the irony of this, of course, is that when we consistently fail to find hope and joy beyond the events of this life, it ceases to be a person or an event or a tragedy that constricts our lives as in a stranglehold. Rather, it begins to look more and more like we’re the ones putting the noose around our own necks.

                Our world is so greatly in need of the example of holy men and women who, like Maximilian Kolbe and John Paul II, take their negative environments and circumstances not as an occasion to complain or to play the proverbial victim-card, but as an opportunity to be galvanized by their trials so that their faith in God and the things of heaven might bring them the true joy that the world cannot give. As we approach the end of 2017, let us resist the temptation to take to Facebook or Twitter to rant about all the undesirable things going on in the world this year. What good does it do? In focusing on our woeful circumstances, we lose our sense of gratitude for the many blessings of our lives and the ways in which God has been present to us over the previous twelve months. Rather than losing ourselves in a barrage of hashtags and jibes, may the final days of this year find us—like St. Maximilian Kolbe—singing for joy, despite our hardships. This is the witness the world needs right now, and it is up to those with faith in God to provide it so that all may come to share in the true joy that comes through faith.