At the “Gate of the Year”

This was my column for St. Mark’s first parish newsletter of 2025, published on Friday, January 3, 2025. I don’t usually post my weekly newsletter columns to this site, but it seems to have struck a chord with more folks than usual, so it’s here in case others might find it an encouragement. You can hear the King’s whole 1939 Christmas radio broadcast on YouTube, here.

Dear Friends,

This week I was reminded of some words of poetry which King George VI quoted at the conclusion of his Christmas radio broadcast in 1939. Germany had invaded and then annexed large portions of Poland, Britain and France had declared war on Germany, and the long naval battle for the Atlantic was already underway. Meanwhile the Soviet Union had invaded Finland and built military bases in the Baltic countries; Japan had invaded China two years before. But large-scale hostilities between the major Western powers had not yet begun, and the world was clearly on the precipice of an abyss. The poetry quoted by the King at Christmas struck a deeply hopeful note, and proved a source of abiding inspiration to many throughout the long years of war:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied,
“Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”

For days the media could not identify the poet, who turned out to be the rather obscure but manifestly holy social worker and teacher, Minnie Louise Haskins, who published it in 1912 as part of a collection of poems meant to raise funds for her work in missions. Her famous poem remains a source of inspiration to me today, and I’ve turned to it occasionally since first hearing it years ago.

It is always tempting to plan as much ahead as humanly possible. And on one level, that’s just good stewardship, the path of wisdom. But what happens when our plans are wrecked, or prove insufficient to the task, or otherwise come up short? Then we come face to face with the question of trust, which it would have been wiser to keep in mind all along: Do we trust God to be faithful, who says to each of us, “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you; I have called you, you are mine; I come that you may have life, and have it abundantly; taste and see that the Lord is good.” Do we trust him to be telling the truth, even if the whole apparatus of our lives – the scaffolding we’ve spent such effort building – comes crashing down? 

Or, put another way, do we trust God because of the many blessings we have received? Or do we trust him because we have no other? I submit that until we have no other, we will find it difficult to trust God, or anyone else for that matter. So a major task of Christian life is to know, and to increase in the knowledge, that we have but one hope, and that no amount of darkness, failure, grief, or pain can snuff it out or take it away; that no amount of success, prosperity, happiness, or fulfillment can take its place. We grow in that knowledge the same way we grow in anything else: by exercise, practice, taking the risk of putting our finger on the wrong note in the studied intent of playing the right one; by stepping out into the darkness and placing our hand into the hand of God.

Life brings no shortage of opportunities to step out into the darkness. As 2025 begins, I commend to you the practice and habit of trust: to put your hand into the hand of God, and step out into the unknown, into the darkness, into whatever abyss may open before your feet. What God has begun in you, in me, in the world, he will bring to completion. Haskins’s poem concludes, “So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. / And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.” So may it be for each of us.

Yours faithfully,

Fr. Blake