Come December the ageing year looks pretty shop soiled.
We might associate the world events of 2012 with the threat of global warming becoming more dire and with the continuing misery of Syria, afflicted by internal violence and international paralysis. We might identify Australian politics with the misery inflicted on asylum seekers for political reasons. We will almost certainly see the Australian Catholic Church through the lens of sex abuse and the flailing responses to it.
That is why in New Year celebrations under a variety of calendars the old year is ritually banished and the new welcomed. In some Buddhist cultures, for example, people ritually wash their faces, wiping away the stain of the old and presenting a new face to the new year.
In Australian popular culture, Christmas and New Year complement one another. Christmas presents an idealised face of the perfect family and of generous individuals. The alcoholic celebration of New Year wipes out the old person and permits a total makeover as the midnight fireworks flare.
In Christian cultures Christmas generally dominates the New Year. Its stories combine a realistic understanding of the old with the promise of something radically new and better. The New Year is seen as living out the hope intimated at Christmas.
Luke's story of Christ's birth begins by listing the emperor and governors in place at the time. This is the public world which controls personal destinies. Mary must walk into the hill country late in pregnancy and is forced to give birth in a paddock because the foreign masters demand new taxation rolls. As a result people from all around Palestine must return to their ancestral homes.
In this world control is never far from violence. In Matthew's story, Herod sees in the story of a new born king a threat to his power. He is used to dealing with threats. All the babies around Bethlehem will die so that he can feel secure.
A great gap divides the powerful, who are active, and the poor who respond as best they can to what is done to them. The first thing Jesus sees is a cattle shelter, and shepherds who spend their lives in the fields. These are unimportant people, part of an old order that is unchanging and unchangeable.
In the Christmas story, the new comes in the form of possibility in unlikely places. A spark is lit and flares along an unnoticed powder train, empowering people who appear to have no power.
The agents of possibility are angels, promising an impossible pregnancy to Mary and to Elizabeth, telling Joseph to marry Mary and to protect Jesus from Herod, warning the wise men and letting the shepherds in on the good news. An unexpected hope in God's help spreads quietly, connects people with one another, and gathers a force sufficient to put down tyrants from their thrones and to raise the lowly.
The Christmas stories touch deeply because they give full weight to the power of the old to control and to deny possibility, but affirm a greater hope. The palace of control is brittle and its walls can be broken by simple and vulnerable people. The emblem of God's possibility is a baby, vulnerable and unconsidered.
In our world the cost of maintaining the old world of control and marginalisation can be seen in the killing and maiming in Syria, the failure to address global warming, the desperation of asylum seekers dumped on Nauru, and the pain and anger of those abused and let down in the Catholic Church. Renewal seems impossible.
But there are small flashes of the new. The bravery of those who relay to the world the voice and experience of ordinary Syrians on whom the guns fall; the persistence of those who will not let us forget the climactic threat to our planet, or the faces of asylum seekers whose lives are blighted by the passion for control; the voices of good people, like Sr Annette Cunliffe, which show that truth does not need to be controlled.
These may be dismissed as candles in the all-encompassing darkness. But great and subversive enterprises have often begun by candlelight.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street. Flickr image by Duckmarx