Into the New Year

Eighty years ago, in his Christmas Day broadcast to the nation in the first year of the Second World War, King George VI quoted from a poem, The Gate of the Year, which had been given to him by his thirteen year old daughter (our present queen).

As we enter a new year, and a new decade, the words of 'the Gate of the Year' speak again to us:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”