Holiness Consists in Beginning Again: Escrivá and Chesterton on the New Year

John 3

"[The] spiritual life is — and I repeat this again and again, on purpose — a constant beginning and beginning again.

"—Beginning again? Yes! Every time you make an act of contrition — and we should make many every day — you begin again, because you offer a new love to God."

The Forge, 384

"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven." Chesterton, The Daily News

N.B. On this octave day of Christmas, the day of the Circumcision (and naming of the Lord -- Jesus) the allusion to new beginnings cannot be missed, circumcision being the Old Testament counterpart (type) of Baptism. "...Paul understands baptism as the new covenant counterpart to circumcision." Scott Hahn, Kinship by Covenant, New Haven: Yale, 2009, 269.

"Jesus' circumcision, on the eighth day after his birth (Cf. Lk 2:21), is the sign of his incorporation into Abraham's descendants, into the people of the covenant. It is the sign of his submission to the Law (Cf. Gal 4:4) and his deputation to Israel's worship, in which he will participate throughout his life. This sign prefigures that 'circumcision of Christ' which is Baptism (Cf. Col 2:11-13)." Catechism of the Catholic Church, 527