I wish you a happy new year
Where all will be joy
Where all will be new
Where even tears are changed into laughter
Marcel Văn on the occasion of Vietnamese New Year (Tết) 1954

Since reading the correspondence of Văn, even back when it was still only available in French, I have often used this quote for greetings for the new year, such as a post on personal social media. The first time, I think, was 2013 or 2014. Over the years, I’ve attached this short quote to various photographs I’ve taken, generating a kind of electronic New Year’s card each time. Up goes the social media post on January 1^st. Happy New Year to everyone I know personally.

Why this quote? What does it mean to me? There are a lot of dimensions at play here, and I’m not entirely surely how all of them fit together nor why this quote is so appealing to me. But the parts do fit together, and the quote does draw me to use it—to pray it.

In the first place, evidently I use Marcel’s text completely backwards. I use it for New Year’s Day, not Tết (which coincides with “Chinese New Year” and doesn’t occur until about a month from now, depending on the lunar calendar). Likewise, Marcel is writing to a Western friend, a priest, about a Vietnamese celebration and custom, whereas I would have been a Westerner writing about a Western custom to a largely non-Western audience among my friends when I lived in Thailand. Yet my beloved Marcel’s words are good and general, and I am happy to use them this way.

There’s also the question of importing into general correspondence that key theme of Văn’s writings: changing sadness into joy. In the context of Văn’s life, this is all about Christianity. Life with Jesus, accepting hardship along with him, is what causes the transformation of suffering into happiness. Moreover, within Văn’s lived, existential theology, the original locus of changing sadness into joy is actually a manifestation of psychological resilience in the face of trauma and abuse, insofar as the psyche intersects with the spirit and has something to do with one’s relationship to God. Marcel changes sadness into joy so as to find meaning in his suffering and so as to live a meaningful relationship with God. That’s psychological resilience—in the places where it borders on the spiritual domain. Marcel’s theology of changing sadness into joy is a theology of abuse. It’s abundantly more than that. But in context, it’s exactly that.

So, when you think of it, what an odd greeting! How can you wish the act of changing sadness into joy for someone who may not be traumatized or abused (in the case of Marcel’s own correspondence)? How can you wish it for a non-Christian (in my own)? Contexts are mismatched.

Ah, but we all have a need to grow in the act of changing sadness into joy. Don’t we? Everyone needs courage and resilience and the fact that things ought to get better. If we know a similar life history and situation as Văn’s, the truth applies. If we don’t, it still applies. Likewise, if we know that God is the ultimate foundation for our meaning and relationships, the truth applies. Yet still, if we do not know, the truth, the desire to leave suffering for happiness, nonetheless rings true.

To wish someone a new year where sadness is changed into joy is, to me, a kind of blessing. After all, it’s the right day of the year for a blessing! The readings at Mass today emphasize it. In one (Num 6:22–27), Moses defines for Aaron the priestly blessing (Hebrew: birkat kohanim). Then in the Psalm, the refrain is “May God bless us in his mercy.”

As a kind of blessing, I of course offer Văn’s New Year greeting to anyone, regardless of their religious affiliation or how much or how little of Church’s teaching they live in their own lives. Evidently, if I were so inclined, I could say something else. I might use other words in my New Year’s greeting, wish, and blessing. If I chose to, I could recite a specific prayer from a prayer book—something a little more formal or ritualized like the birkat kohanim. But if I want to meet people where they are, Văn’s words are, I think, a wonderful present, a gift, an invocation of the blessing of God into people’s lives. It captures what is to me one of the most important dimensions of my own living of my life: changing sadness into joy. It’s honest about who I am. It abounds in meaning for me. Yet, while I’m not hiding, I’m not overpowering, proselytizing, or preaching either. A New Year’s greeting is not the time for that.

Does the person hearing my New Year’s blessing know how deep the meaning really is to me? Are they a Christian? And if a Christian, do they understand the abuse crisis in the same way as me? In all probability, no. But I give good wishes and bless in a way that means something to me and still can be received profitably, and joyfully, by the receiver. The words I use might draw God’s grace more towards them and them more towards God’s grace, however that may manifest at that moment in that life. It meets people where they are and accompanies them, without denying where I am, too. Isn’t that one of the shining faces of love and person-to-person care, even when, or especially when, you aren’t on the same page?

Ah, but maybe I’m now talking in a veiled way about something else.

But I’m definitely still saying exactly what is close to my heart about this New Year greeting that I really have been using for a decade.

I wish you all a happy new year, where all will be joy, where all will be new, where even tears are changed into laughter. God bless.