New York—The approaching New Year, as always, fills me with both joy and foreboding. As Earth’s annual dance around the sun nears its completion, the familiar rites of gift-giving, celebration, and prognostication unfold—rites that act as comfort food for the soul, the spirit weary after the year’s travails and seeking moments of solace and rest, to meditate on the journey, on wherever one is on the path one has chosen.

In the larger context, there is Barack Obama’s presidency to look forward to in less than a month; that is the fervent expectation of all those who, the past eight years, despaired of finding intelligent, morally and environmentally responsible life in the extraterrestrial realm (and I don’t refer to the sense of the sublime) that the White House occupied.

At the same time, the mess that Obama is inheriting instills a great deal of trepidation that too many things are broken even for someone as smart and seemingly extraordinarily capable as he is to fix. The best thing to do is to take a deep breath, look ahead, and hope that the hard lessons learned will be taken to heart and remembered.

At the same time, looking ahead is to take Thomas Wolfe’s advice to look homeward, angel. And homeward is right here, where we are. As with the two-headed Roman god Janus, for whom it is named, the first month of the renewed voyage is to be spent looking both ways, for we begin where we end, and we end where we begin. Herein lies the significance our circular planetary voyage imparts to us.

Put another way, Sa haba-haba ng prusesyon, sa simbahan din ang tuloy. (No matter how long, the procession still winds up in church.) But when exactly does the voyage through space begin and when does it end? To those accustomed to the solar calendar, it’s January 1st and December 31st, respectively, with a leap year every four years, when an extra day is thrown in to make up for the shortfall of one calendar day.

To those who go by the lunar calendar, the dates are a moveable feast. Take Chinese New Year. Even as we count down on the 31st, the current year still continues to the Chinese, with the next one, the Year of the Ox, commencing on January 26, 2009. For the Jews, Rosh Hashanah marks the New Year, in September or early October, while for Zoroastrians (the ancient religion of the Persians), the year begins with the spring equinox. And devotees of the winter solstice (December 21 in the northern hemisphere) make a credible argument that the shortest day of the year marks the apogee of the voyage, the very next day beginning the renewed swing towards more light.

However one marks its circuit, there can be no quibble about our planet straying from the ordained galactic path. Any deviation would spell disaster, a consummation not to be devoutly wished, either by fire or by ice.

In terms of one’s personal voyage one can very well think in moments of despair, not without justification, that life is just a vicious circle: same-o, same-o, in apt New Yorkese. To travel so far and still arrive at the same point: isn’t that a cruel twist of fate? Doesn’t one deserve better? Déjà vu—over and over again!

Yet it is in the familiar wherein lies our deepest mystery, and challenge: to be surprised not by something new but by what we know — or think we do. To the common imperative “Expect the unexpected,” I would add “from the expected.” Or stand the French aphorism on its head, and declare, “The more things remain the same, the more they change.”

Deep down we all have that counterintuitive sense, if only we would cultivate it, that there is always something to be gleaned from well-known patterns. Variations on a theme, if you will. One of the greatest composers unequalled in the art of sublime variations from an array of musical patterns was Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach knew to explore the familiar; jazz musicians know it; artists of any worth know it; and even as the birds and the bees execute their familiar orbits, they too may know it.

As we complete our solar year, what could be more familiar than the tale of Christmas--familiar not just to Christians, but to practically everyone regardless of faith, even if only in its rudimentary form. (Besides, the messianic figure is a fixture in almost all folklore and mythologies.) How many variants are there, of this birth of a god in humble circumstances, fated to be killed (with his foreknowledge) for speaking truth to power, for his advocacy work on behalf of the disenfranchised and the poor, and his promise of liberation? Countless: In the hands of inventive minds, the familiar becomes fresh, becomes compelling, becomes art.

There’s Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol, and Handel’s Messiah. There’s the Christ of the Tagalog Pasyon, focused on the redeemer of humble folk and bearer of revolutionary aspirations. And there’s Monty Python’s hilarious Life of Brian, which examines Christ’s life and times through the misadventures of the eponymous hero, born on the same date, in the stable next door. I also remember reading with delight Pete Lacaba’s “Pasyong Mahal ni San Jose” (“The Sacred Passion of St. Joseph”) wherein the carpenter doesn’t quite know how to react when God gets his wife Mary pregnant.

None of these are conventionally reverential, which is what most representations are and to my mind, the most limited, freezing one moment in time forever, a mummified but pretty (and pretty meaningless) exhibit trotted out annually. Of course, there’s something comforting in the well-known elements: the manger, the shepherds, the barn animals, the angels, the glittery night sky, the displaced-for-the-moment parents hovering above the infant, and in the near distance the three magi approaching with gifts.

How then to make this tale come alive for the nth time? Webster’s defines originality as “the quality or state of being original; freshness of aspect, design, or style; the power of independent thought or constructive imagination.” That last part is what attracts me, as it deals with how one approaches material, rather than whether it’s new material.

What if the characters witnessing the birth of the golden child could have been interviewed? Supposing someone sat down with one of the shepherds and got his perspective? I couldn’t help but think that Studs Terkel, interviewer and oral historian extraordinaire who passed away last October at the age of 96, would have been perfect. He was and remains peerless in discovering the quiet drama underneath a seemingly ordinary life.

Terkel won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1985, his interviews of supposedly nondescript, working-class Americans collected in such works as Hard Times, Division Street, and Working: People Talk About What they Do all Day, and How They Feel About What They Do. His singular contribution was to insert the voices and names of the voiceless and the nameless into history.

Imagine Studs finding out not just what that fateful night meant to the shepherd but what sort of life he had led. And perhaps the shepherd would have been surprised at learning something about his own life—a life he had assumed he knew every stitch of. Studs had the gift of listening empathetically — a quality rarely evidenced in most interviewers— letting the interviewee move easily along the paths of a remembered life.

I was fortunate enough to have been a guest on his radio program, The Studs Terkel Program on WFMT in Chicago shortly after the 1993 publication of Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Philippine Literature in English, which I had edited for Rutgers University Press.

Studs must have been 81 years old when I met him, but he had the energy of a much younger man. He surprised me by playing the Philippine national anthem just before we began our on-air conversation. What was even more amazing was that he knew Philippine history, knew the darker aspects of the colonial relationship between the U.S. and the Philippines. To top it all, he had read enough of the anthology to engage me in genuine conversation. I had a great time, and I hope he did, too.

Perhaps then one of the innumerable things we can take from the tale of Christmas is to perceive, as Studs did, the beauty in the plain, the extraordinary in the ordinary. To discern the infinite in the mundane, to see the sacred in the secular and in each other--now that would truly be divine.

Copyright L. H. Francia