It has become a tradition that I celebrate new year with the nuns on Tautra. Driving north this afternoon, past multiple stores advertising cheap fireworks, I rejoiced at the prospect of seeing out 2023 in a setting of simplicity and recollection. I kept thinking of the words of Paul VI, from a speech he gave in Nazareth in 1964, set as the second reading for Vigils this morning, for the feast of the Holy Family: ‘May esteem for silence, that admirable and indispensable condition of mind, revive in us, besieged as we are by so many uplifted voices, the general noise and uproar, in our seething and over-sensitized modern life. May the silence of Nazareth teach us recollection, inwardness, the disposition to listen to good inspirations and the teachings of true masters. May it teach us the need for and the value of preparation, of study, of meditation, of personal inner life, of the prayer which God alone sees in secret.’ There is stuff, here, for a realisable, life-giving resolution for the new calendar year.