Dear Melanie,
I always used to make a little retreat on New Year’s Eve – go off for a few hours to a quiet chapel or convent and reflect on the past year. I would thank God for all his many gifts, his blessings, his great patience with me, and then I would ask pardon for all the ways in which I let him down, obstructed the work he wanted to do through me or rejected his graces. And then I would come up with a relevant, deep, spiritual New Year’s Resolution. I would also choose a Bible verse to be my motto for the coming year. And with that, I would be thoroughly refreshed in my spirit, and ready to celebrate the annual transition with a few good friends (I tended to avoid the riotous wing-dings – too many temptations). Here in my cubicle-cell, I am doing my best to follow this little tradition, which I picked up from a very old monk I met when traveling through Eastern Europe as a junior in college. I wanted to send you this note today to tell you about it because I am convinced that you are spiritually mature enough to adopt it for yourself. It’s actually the kind of thing your namesake would have done (happy Saint’s Day, by the way).
Melania really was a remarkable woman. Her parents were Christians, but her dad was also a noble Roman, fabulously wealthy, and filled with ambition – he became a Senator (his name was Publicola). Melania was their only child, and in order to ensure the continuance of his family line, her father arranged a marriage for her to a kinsman of great position and reputation. Melania, however, had long since harbored a deep desire to be dedicated to God alone. Her father wouldn’t hear of it, and she was married. She asked her husband, Pinian, if they might live together in continence, as a way of devoting themselves more fully to spiritual things, but he refused, and so their first child was born, a daughter who died within a year of birth. Soon she was pregnant again, gave birth prematurely to a son who died the next day, leaving her sick and on the verge of death herself for weeks. She recovered, and Pinian now agreed to join her in living a more supernatural nuptial union, but her father was furious.
For five years he forced them to maintain all the pomp and glitz of the Roman aristocracy when all they wanted was to retreat to the country and dedicate themselves to serving the poor and freeing slaves. On his deathbed, her father finally realized his mistake. As he lay dying, he conferred on her his vast estates and asked for her forgiveness because, “fearing the ridicule of evil tongues, I have grieved you by opposing your heavenly vocation.” Melania was then free to spend her life pleasing God. She, together with her husband and her mother, Albina, retired to a villa outside of Rome and formed a proto-religious community, the first of countless endeavors she would undertake in favor of Christ’s Kingdom throughout the coming decades.
I find it particularly appropriate that she passed away on New Year’s Eve. She preferred hard work and self-discipline when her social status offered her the sumptuous pleasures of cultivated luxury, and I am sure it wasn’t always easy. But as her worldly peers were frolicking mindlessly at some New Year’s Eve party that last day of the year 439, she was being welcomed into heaven’s precincts – and I’m sure the celebration she has enjoyed ever since was well worth the sacrifice of a few earthly soirees.
Happy New Year, sincerely, your uncle, Eddy
