My dear friends...

Well, I did it. I wrote “2022” for the first time on a check the other day. Somehow, for me, that makes it official. And, unlike some other years, when I’d make a mistake the first few times I had to write the date, this time I had no trouble at all remembering to write two-zero-two-TWO. I was so happy that Old Year was over!

It’s been a tough year for that, hasn’t it? A tough year. A long year. A year of challenge, for sure. Some people thought it would never end. Indeed, some people thought that we would end before the year did.

But the world didn’t end on December 31 as some people feared it would, and it’s over now.

Not all of us. No, not all of us who started the year are ending it here on Earth. But all those who have left, all those who have gone home...those of Covid 19, the humans young and old everywhere --- some of them known personally by us --- all of those who have left us are still alive and well...joyously happy to be home.

That is God’s great promise...and it is a promise I believe.

And now, for the whole of humanity --those who are here in body and those who are here in spirit --- a new epic has begun.

A brand new cycle is now underway. The whole of the cosmos has completed its spin. The turning of the Universe Itself begins anew. And the question is: Where to from here, on this next journey around the heavenly circle? Where is humanity headed? Where are our own LIVES headed? And what’s it all about, anyway?

That’s a question that the person whose birth we celebrated on December 24 sought to answer for us. And the answer He gave us was much bigger than the constructs of any particular belief system, or the dogmas of any particular religion. The answer he gave us transcends the exterior boundaries that religious “brand names” would seek to place on our inner experience.

And so it is good that people of every religion --- and people belonging to no religion at all --- use this beginning of a New Year to get in touch again with a message that is eternal. And as we end this 5,000-plus year cycle, as we embark upon a new epoch, there could hardly be a better time to hear that message again. Because as we look at our lives, as we witness events on our planet from New York to Bombay, we see that there are so many things in our world that we are not choosing, do not seek, aound that we wish were not so.

Sometimes it feels as if there is nothing we can do to make things better. But there is. And it will make things better, if each of us simply decides to do it.

Composer David Alan Friedman put it perfectly when he wrote a song with the lyric line: “We can be kind. We can take care of each other.” But it’s not enough, Mr. Friedman reminds us, to simply sing a song. “We’ve got to try to get along.”

I know we all agree. But it seems that it is impossible for human beings to do that. Unless it’s not. Unless we see ourselves in a new way. Unless we adopt and embrace our True Identity.

Each of us carry within us the wisdom, the clarity, the caring, the compassion, and the love that was demonstrated by all the masters of all the great religions and all the world’s spiritual traditions. Each of those masters came to tell us that Divinity is built into all of us by Divinity Itself.

And so, as we start a brand new year and a brand new epoch, we remember that the way to get along is to “get along” with the real reason we came here. Our Soul is on a mission here...and I don’t speak for you, but I speak for me when I tell myself: it’s time for me to “get along” with it.

My soul didn’t come here with the idea that the one with the most toys at the end wins. My soul came here with a deep awareness that the one who gives the most gifts wins. That’s true, of course, for all of us. Each of us has something wonderful to give to everyone who crosses our path.

The gift-giving season just past does not have to end. It can be Christmas forever. As each person crosses our path, we can look deep within and decide: What is the gift this person came to receive from me in this moment? If this were Christmas Eve, as was George Bailey in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, would I think of going to a bridge at the edge of town and jump off because I thought my life was a failure? Or would I listen to the better angels of my nature and see the gift I have to give in each moment, and give it?

Yes, it can be Christmas Forever. And the New Age can at last turn into the New Epoch, when the Season of Giving never ends.

Hugs and love,