The start of the year (especially a school year) begins with many aspirations, dreams and intentions. On the surface a new year is clean. It is the kind of beginning you can schedule: new diary, new term, new haircut, new uniform, new shoes that still squeak a little. But real beginnings are seldom neat. They arrive more like weather than stationery. You feel the pressure shift before you see the rain. It arrives after a door closes that you didn’t want closed, or after a version of yourself collapses under the weight of being ‘fine.’ It arrives when you realise you cannot keep living on yesterday’s fuel.
There is a strange old law in Deuteronomy 21, about a body found in a field – an unsolved death, no known perpetrator, no neat moral conclusion. How easy would this to be swallowed by silence. There’s no-one to put on trial, no closure, no narrative of heroism to tidy it up.
But the law refuses to let the community move on as normal.
The elders measure which town is closest. The leaders of that nearest town have to step forward. They bring a young heifer to a valley with running water, to a place that has not been worked. They wash their hands over the animal and speak words that matter more than they probably realise:
This was not our doing… do not let innocent blood remain among your people.
It is a communal confession for a sin no one can pin to a single person. In this time and in this place a fresh start is when a community has the courage to name what cannot be solved, to grieve what cannot be explained, and to accept responsibility for the kind of world they are creating – even when they did not commit the crime.
God builds beginnings out of truth-telling. Not just personal truth-telling – communal truth-telling.
I refer to this because there are things that fracture a family, a staffroom, a school, a parish, a nation, and nobody can quite locate the moment it began. There is no single culprit, no single incident, no simple villain. Just a slow accumulation of fatigue and sharpness, distrust and defensiveness, unspoken grief and unprocessed stress.
And then we try to start again with pep? We write the new goals. We set the new routines. We post the new mantra.
But Deuteronomy whispers: you cannot start again without washing your hands in running water. Not as theatre. As a sacrament of accountability.
There is something that resonates in my intrinsically Catholic heart about this obscure old law. Catholic theology is (mostly) honest about fracture. Think about Mass and the moment we pause and acknowledge our sins asking – Lord, have mercy. We are not morbid. We are realistic. We know that mercy is not an accessory. Mercy is the climate in which human beings can be remade.
Running water matters because it moves. It is not stagnant. It is not the kind of water you can keep in a jar and control. Running water is honest water. It doesn’t let you freeze the moment and curate the narrative. Isn’t that a bit like grace? Grace does not simply wipe the slate clean like a cosmic whiteboard. Grace moves through what is real. Grace runs through the places we would rather keep sealed. Grace is God saying, I can make something new here, if you are willing.
The modern myth of fresh start is that you can begin again without cost. Just decide. Just manifest. Just declutter. Just change your mindset.
But Scripture is more demanding (and more tender) than that. In the Bible, new beginnings usually require one or more of the following:
- leaving something you wanted to keep
- telling the truth you wanted to avoid
- accepting a responsibility you didn’t choose
- waiting longer than you hoped
- walking forward without a map
Which is why the first Christians did not speak about starting over as a vibe. They spoke about conversion. They spoke about metanoia – a deep turning. A reorientation of the self, not a makeover of the surface. It is essentially a conversion of heart, not a make-over.
Deuteronomy’s valley ritual is an ancient way of saying: innocent blood changes the soil. Violence, neglect, cruelty, indifference – these things don’t vanish because time passes. They stain the ground. They shape the atmosphere. They alter what grows next. Therefore, the community must respond, even when nobody gets to feel heroic about it.
Here is the Catholic heart of it: God is not afraid of the parts of your life that feel unresolved.
Not the conflict that never got the ending you needed.
Not the grief that keeps resurfacing like a tide.
Not the guilt that is complicated because you did not mean to, but you still did it.
Not the weariness that makes you look at a new day and feel nothing but heaviness.
God does not wait until your story is tidy to begin again with you.
In fact, the pattern of salvation is that God begins again precisely where things are untidy. That is what the Incarnation is: God entering the unresolved world, not hovering above it giving motivational speeches.
And that is what the Cross is: God taking responsibility for what we cannot fix, without pretending it isn’t there.
And that is what the Resurrection is: God insisting that the final word is not fracture, not failure, not blood in the field, not the unsolved.
The final word is life.
So here is the quiet invitation, if you are standing at the edge of a new year, new stage. Try a Deuteronomy kind of beginning. Not perfection. Start with running water.
Let grace move through what is real.
Ask yourself, gently but honestly:
- What has happened here that I have tried to move past without naming?
- Where am I carrying something unresolved that needs mercy, not denial?
- What responsibility am I being asked to accept, not because I am guilty, but because I belong to a community?
- What would it look like to begin again in truth, rather than in performance?
And then do the most Catholic thing you can do: bring it to God.
Not as a report or a list. As a surrender. Because fresh starts in the Christian life are not self-generated. They are received. They arrive when God gives you courage to stand in the valley, tell the truth, and discover that mercy is not a weakness. Mercy is the way God makes tomorrow possible.
So, God of living water, begin again in us.
In our classrooms and corridors,
wash what we have carried in silence,
heal what we have learned to tolerate,
and make us brave enough for Truth
so mercy can remake us.
Go gently.
The Female Theologian 