A Wall Street broker named Jamie can stand as one emblem for this New Year, 2002. At age 45, he has decided to give up his profession, move out of the city, and find another line of work. For him, it is time to simplify his life and redirect himself away from the money chase.

The motor for such far-reaching change in his life has been the horrific events of September 11. From the windows of his office, Jamie saw the World Trade Center towers collapse with their catastrophic loss of life and witnessed from a distance the chaos in the streets below. These sights had enough power to reorient his values so that he now wants a lifestyle that brings him closer to what counts most in the long run.

Of course, not everybody will draw the same conclusions from the events of that fateful September day. Some people will change their spiritual orientation without stepping away from their jobs or their current residences. And others of us will simply let the events to wear off in time and go on as we were before.

But Jamie and others like him will take the catastrophes of this autumn as a signal for dramatic transformation of their lives. For them, the year 2002 promises to bring new selves as they break with old patterns of work and living.

New Year, as a rite of passage, has long been seen as an opportunity for change. This passage has the power to make people believe they can transform their behavior. That is why some of us still make resolutions designed to improve our conduct. Even if we have a long record of failure in trying to keep past resolutions, our hopes spring up again and we become convinced that the coming year can be different from the past.

Spiritual traditions support the New Year as a time to start over. God, the compassionate and merciful one, invites his creatures to begin again, to become faithful rather than continue to wander away from the right paths. No matter how far we have betrayed ourselves and others, God will take us back.

The notion of metanoia in Greek, of changing one’s mentality, remains basic to the spiritual life of believers. It is never too late to change, to repent, to set out anew.

For some of us, the invitation to change might mean, not making our behavior more moral and generous, but rather allowing ourselves to enjoy the beauty of the world and the beauty of human life more than we have in years past. A model for this change is the 90 year old poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz, a native of Poland and now an American citizen who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.

In an essay called “Happiness” written in recent years, he describes what it can be like to find intense happiness in the world of nature. After visiting a valley in Lithuania where his grandparents once lived he wrote:

“I was looking at a meadow. Suddenly the realization came that during my years of wandering I had searched in vain for such a combination of leaves and flowers as was here and that I have always been yearning to return. Or, to be precise, I understood this

after a huge wave of emotion had overwhelmed me, and the only name I can give it now would be – bliss.”

Allowing ourselves to be happy could amount to a breakthrough worth much. Opening ourselves up to the experience of bliss, as the poet did, can be precious. Czeslaw Milosz does so even though in his lifetime he witnessed the horrors that were done to the people of his native Poland. From those fearsome years he has developed a proper pessimism about human beings left to themselves.

But he believes in God as the one who can rescue us from ourselves. Author and critic John Updike calls him “a believer full of reasonable doubts” and admires Milosz’s affirmation of the whole person, heart and soul.

Perhaps, therefore, the Polish poet and the Wall Street stockbroker can serve as inspiration for New Year 2002. They both are acquainted with horror and the coldly irrational instinct to murder one’s fellow human beings on a mass scale. But they are also seekers seizing the new opportunities to find their bliss.

Richard Griffin