Merry New Year To All! Gaudium Novus Annus tu Omnis

(Note-this piece was originally published on 1 January, 2015)

Mandeville, LA – 2015 2016 is here and may I extend my humble thanks to all of you my dear brothers and sisters. The year that was 2014 was filled with much joy and tribulation. I am thankful more for the tribulation than the joy and hope it is extended into this year. It has been my privilege to know all of you and an even greater blessing to know some of you intimately. May we resolve to communicate more personally with each other in 2015 in pursuit of Christian charity while I pledge, before God, to seek humility among you in all things. I plan to republish an out of print book titled “Humility of The Heart” (NOW available here!) a work I am nearly finished reading. From it’s rule 50 I share with you a New Years resolve we can all make in earnest and be better Men and Women for it.

Humility is charitable, interpreting all  things for the best and pitying and excusing the  faults of others as much as possible. For this  reason St Peter, wishing to exhort us (1) to love and  have compassion upon our fellow-creatures, also  exhorts us at the same time to be humble : “Having compassion one of another, being lovers of  the brotherhood-humble,” for there can be no  charity without humility, and therefore to censure  and criticize too readily the actions of our neighbours and to judge and speak ill of them are vices condemn first one and then another, I am usurping an authority I do not possess and which be-  longs to God alone : “For God is Judge.”(2) And  if this is not pride, what is pride? In punishment  of such arrogance God often permits us to fall  • into the very faults that we have condemned in  others, and it is well for us to remember the  teaching of St Paul : “Wherefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest.  For wherein thou judgest another thou condemnest thyself.”

Merry New Year to you and yours, I pray for all of you everyday and beg you to help me be accountable to the pursuit of humility in 2015 and beyond.

1. Book of Peter, Ch. 3, v 8

2. Psalm XLIX (49)