On New Year's Eve we drove in circles around the city. Intersection after intersection was blocked with ambulances and police cars, surrounding the aftermath of celebration, and everywhere we looked there was a crowd of wobbly kneed men making catcalls or outright physically harassing an equally inebriated female garbed in slips of fabric designed to entice.

The temperature hovered around zero, but nobody felt the sting of the cold any more than they were currently able to feel the sting of their underlying loneliness, despair, debt, or failure. This was it, arguably the biggest party night of the year, the biggest and best celebration of new beginnings and resolutions, of the passing of time, of the survival of another year and the prospect of another. This was it, and as another fire truck whizzed by, I felt a sick knot in my stomach. Our friends and family, neighbours and coworkers, our very selves, all giving away the birthright of free will to indulge in the ultimate surrender of self control. On this knife-edge between past and future, self was vomited into the gutter leaving chaos in its place. Was anybody here really alive anymore?

Fun is truly a necessity of life. Love and celebration were always intended to be the heartbeat of culture, and so in this present age our souls rightfully long for a trill of light to push away the darkness. I wonder though, have we become so numb and unaware that we don't even know what light and darkness are anymore?

If this New Year's Eve celebration is the culmination of our culture's sense of light and enjoyment, then surely to a lesser degree the same peak is aspired to all year round. If this is it, if we think this is life and light, then day to day we will be looking for a glimpse of it, looking for a way to live our lives with as little of self as possible so as to give our souls over to the pulse and frenzy of inebriation. If this is the high point we pine for, if this is what we put our hope in, then maybe our hearts are just as drunk on lies all year round as our brains were on alcohol last night. Because inviting the darkness in to kill your self will never bring you light.

It's everywhere. Everywhere you turn, the darkness is calling you. Its lies pulsate through the air like the pounding of a drum, carefully keeping time with the rhythm of your heart so as to easily take up residence there and eventually take over. It tells you that if you let your self be devoured by sex, you will find love. If you let your self be devoured by money and the thrill of chasing it, you will find prosperity. If you let your self be devoured by vanity, you will find beauty. If you let your self be devoured by selfishness, you will find safety, and if you let your self be devoured by lies, you will find peace.

The darkness will always tell you that nothing is better for you than what you want, and that nothing is more important than what is best for you. And these lies, when believed, result in death. Maybe not death to your body, at least not yet, but certainly death to your soul. It may have been past midnight, but I could see that much in the streets of people last night.

Ignorance is bliss. That's what they say, isn't it? And bliss is also freedom. But where has it gotten us, this pattern of being ignorant of what is good and right, this absence of the light? We are losing ourselves to the darkness, being eaten alive by it, held tight in its lying claws with no knowledge of how to escape. We don't have the wisdom or the power to break the cycle on our own, to stop thinking that if we get them into bed; that if we lose this weight; that if we work hard and make a fortune; that if we stay in a substance-induced fog, things will be okay. And so we give ourselves over to it, living and breathing day in and day out as people of the lie. It's exhausting, it's depressing, it's humiliating, and we are slaves.

Over 2,000 years ago a man inarguably wiser than any of us said that he was the truth, the way, and the light, and that when we knew the truth, it would set us free. His yoke is easy, his burden is light, and he came to set the captives free. Is it any surprise that less than a week after celebrating his birth the darkness rose up to swallow us? Terrified of losing its slaves, it swooped down to plug our ears from hearing any more of this nonsense about hope and salvation, and instead replaced it with drunkenness and that age-old question: What can I do this year that will get me what I want?

Lights out. Game over. Crisis averted. The people have ended their year with 31 days to contemplate the meaning of Christmas, and begun the year with 11 months to meditate on how to lose themselves in some sly form of selfish ambition that they'll likely fail at and that either way will do nothing but eat them alive and leave them even less satisfied than they were before. They crawl out of their beds on the afternoon of January the 1st and wince; the light is too bright and hurts their aching heads. They pull the blankets over their eyes and go to sleep. God reaches out mournfully; nobody reaches back. His still small voice echoes across the land: Wake up.