Below are the thoughts of Dr. Lajos Békefy written in Rome.
The New Year's hug at my parents' house was sweet for a good seventy years. When the wood-scented warmth emanated from the fireplace and I slept through the next year in my mother's lap. The New Year's hug in the family home was sweet, when I listened to the quiet and peaceful cooing of my children with their Mother, and we covered them with our prayers. The New Year's Eve and New Year's service in the churches where I was able to serve was unforgettable. The turn of the times and our destiny to the New Year was reassuring, when we knew nothing about what tomorrow would bring, we just believed: with a heart entrusted to our provident good Father and our Savior, we would have the strength for everything in the next 365 days or in the measured personal time.
And in the meantime, how many and how many old years did we shake off the dust hoping for peace? And what did we get? Even greater restlessness, sometimes a kind face and a voice inviting the momentary table-setting love into your home. And what do we get now? I would like to rewrite Kálvin's New Year's farewell and New Year's prayers, which I have quoted so many times in my writings over the years. Or the wise words of the Chinese Christian about the fact that at the gate of the new year, it will be enough if we place our hands and our hope in the hands of our Father and our Christ with faith, and move forward in the strength of the Holy Spirit. But at the turn of 2022-2023 and here, in the eternal city and the Vatican, seeing the star years of my destiny turn 75, I stop on the road and look up at this particularly high blue sky. What do you send to me, to us, Lord, from there with your history-translator, destiny-translator order and mercy?
Memories are swirling in my soul here. About Miklós Duray, who returned home in the last hours of this very year, next to Count János Eszterházy, the most important Hungarian writer and politician from the highlands, the tireless guardian of our national consciousness and belonging, ready to make all sacrifices, unflinchingly fighting scrutinies and conscious misinterpretations, standing on the castle walls. About the deep-rooted undertaker of our Reformed faith together with his spouse. The faces of more and more of our fellow travelers flash before me, those who left in 2022, and who knows where they will be staying at the end of 2023.
In the winter spring waving a memorial scarf for the old year, in Rome and the Vatican, Budapest and Bratislava, Ungvár and Cluj, and everywhere in the Hungarian-living place of the world, before and above everything, it is the Word of God that stands like a white dove hovering over our hearts and fills our souls with certainty , the blessing of remaining, keeping: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8).
The only permanence, our personal and communal eternal constant, our unchanging reality is Jesus Christ. Today, when the Holy Spirit brings this Word to us as a heavenly dove messenger, looking back at 2022, this Word made me grateful for everything. For a blessing that we were able to accept with humility, for trials through which He led us to keep and win with trusting faith. For temptations in which we did not fall into deadly depths or into salvation-threatening, self-destructive passions and sufferings. It is the eternal Jesus Christ who, even in 2022, felt the truth of János Pilinszky's poetically fine-tuned faith: "We are spread out in the nets/of the vibrating stars". I would continue like this: in the retaining network of shining Verbs. And He, the eternal Jesus Christ, will be the One who will also fill our astonished hearts in 2023, for Whom and in Whom "don't leave your fate to the stars", to any celestial calculations or horoscopes, but to the One and Only Star, Who will rise every day in your heart, like the morning star (2 Peter 1:19).
In these days, when in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican, there is an ever-increasing crowd of curiosity, but also sincere deep prayer, with glances of sympathy towards the sky, and we can see the media intrusion of news-hungry cameras on the square for the seriously ill XVI. Inquiring about the well-being of Pope Emeritus Benedict, I couldn't stop myself from visiting the Carmelite church on Via della Conziliazione near St. Peter's Square, craving some peace. On the one hand, because the church itself recalled the happy changes of the year of my childhood in Győr, in our parents' house, near the Carmelite church overlooking the Rába beach. And the Carmelite monk who lived next door, from whom I learned the first English, French, and Latin words, and who brought worlds together in his amazingly simple, one-room emergency apartment with his faith and his fantastic philosophical and theological education - and his prayers. In the middle of the persecution of the church, he finally got out from behind the socialist iron curtain and into the "free world" with the help of the Vatican. And look, who did I look at here in this Carmelite church?
To the portrait of the previously unknown scientist Carmelite theologian, journalist, professor, martyr Titus BRANDSMA, who suffered a brutal death in Auschwitz on July 26, 1942, for his unshakable faith, the Gospel and his unquenchable Christian humanity. As soon as Bonhoeffer did for his Protestant faith. And many others too – for their Old and New Testament faith. With his Dutch-Frisian roots in Christianity, Brandsma prayed in the deepest depths like this: You, Lord Jesus, are here with me./I have never been this close to you either./Stay with me, stay in me, my Jesus./There is nothing better than having you with me. /And by your Spirit beside me/ you stand forever.
Lord Jesus, who are the same yesterday, today and forever, come in 2023, stand by us, stay in us with your Word and your Spirit. Then may come deep night and anything, no hope is good, In you our life will be happy and grateful, eternal Present.
Featured image: Getty Images
