Sandra saw the announcement of T. R. Pearson’s book signing and suggested we go. “It’s in Jackson, Mississippi,” she added. Jackson is about a seven hour drive from Huntsville, where we are spending the holidays and yet this was not an event that either one of us wanted to miss. I went immediately to the Amazon page and saw that the book, Year of Our Lord, is described thusly:

“Lucas McCarty lives in the Mississippi Delta. He is the only white congregant in the African-American Trinity House of Prayer Holiness church. Lucas is bereft of the ability to speak due to cerebral palsy, yet he sings there in the church choir. Thus is the subject of Year of Our Lord, a portrait of courage, acceptance and grace, rendered in the lyrical prose of T.R. Pearson and the haunting photographs of Langdon Clay. Year of Our Lord is a visual journey, exploring one of the poorest parts of the American South, a place that economic progress has left behind. And it is a spiritual journey, a revelation of a community that has replaced the hope for earthly prosperity with an abundance of faith in God and the life beyond. The Delta’s is a culture that can look upon Lucas and say, ‘God doesn’t make a mistake.’ It is a place that in the face of abject poverty can proclaim, life offers ‘too much joy!’ Year of Our Lord, then, is an opportunity to see into another’s world, and to embrace the best of it.”

We had no idea what we were in for.

Last year at this most merry of holiday (holy-day) seasons, we were back in Alabama visiting our relatives and enjoying the hospitality of San’s folks, Martha and Clarence Bray. I was in high political mode, having just published a book Counter-Narrative to great reviews by progressives and predictably panned by right-wingers.

So, because one of my all-time favorite Christmas stories is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I then wrote a series of political blogs that brought Scrooge into the 21^stcentury as what in this year’s fashion we would call one of the 1%. My version begins:

Ebenezer Scrooge, Teapublican from Down There, tallied his books for 2010 with a self-satisfied smile.  It had been a good year, a very good year.  His disinformation business, funded by the Brothers Koch and popularized by his old pal Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda outlets had succeeded in convincing an increasingly docile electorate of many false things.  That the world was not warming and those who said it was were dreaded socialists; that health care for all was really a liberal government takeover that would lead to—he licked his oversized lips—“death panels”; that increased regulation of the oil and food industries was further evidence of the government’s unwarranted intrusion into their lives and profits; and that lowering taxes for the rich—including himself, of course—was as important to the maintenance of democracy as slop was to the maintenance of pigs.  Oink!  He smiled.  Yes, this had been a very good year!

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year.

It is that we should have a new soul.” -  G. K. Chesterton

Probably I have been spending too much time reading and listening to “end of the year” reviews, “best of,” “worst of,” and other tributes to 2011. That must be it.

Surely it is their unfortunate influence that urges me today to join in the timeless habit of gossips, town criers, old farts, bar cronies, grannies, and purveyors of real and imagined newsprint everywhere and develop my very own version of “The Year in Review.” It’s taken me some time to formulate a way of telling it, given that the genre of such year-end reviews necessitates at least some mention of world affairs and my year has not exactly been about much of that, at least not the last six months of it, wherein my attention was deflected by cancer. But as you will see, that deflection into Cancerland led me to think quite differently about what was important and what must be done now to honor what I’ve learned.

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