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After Christmas Eve services, two Columbia students, who had attended both of the Christmas services, asked how they could volunteer. We get that question most weeks after service. I hear in that question, “How can I help?” “How can I do something about what I just heard?” Maybe even, “How can I belong?”

At the end of 2025, I am so grateful to all of you for your welcome of me and our family, especially Kaash, the tiny dog, to the Close. We are very grateful to the many hands it takes to do things as concrete as renovating an apartment and as abstract as engaging a different leader. I am excited for the years ahead.

Canon Steven Nicholas leaned over at the Christmas Eve Midnight service to say the Cathedral was pulsing with energy. It was electric that night, as it should be when we make our best offerings and invite people to bring their full selves. Electric with the power of the spirit among us, reviving us for the days ahead. “Joy, anyway” the Episcopal LGBT activist Louie Clay used to sign off his emails. “Joy, anyway” is a fitting theme for the year ahead.

We will remain clear-eyed and truthful about the world around us, and respond with Christian hope, the truth within us that cannot be hidden, that God’s justice is our truth. We will be a place to ignite and engage energy like those young adults who want to be about something like this, and to do their part.

In 1755 John Wesley held his first Covenant Renewal Service. You can hear the familiar Wesleyan pattern in the prayer below written for that day.

I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will, place me with whom you will. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be put to work for you or set aside for you, Praised for you or criticized for you. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and fully surrender all things to your glory and service. And now, O wonderful and holy God, you are mine, and I am yours. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, Let it also be made in heaven. Amen.

Wesley’s prayers feel like an offering of everything before God. John Wesley was an Anglican priest and missionary to the United States, who emerged from an English Anglican movement that emphasized personal holiness and responsibility. That made the Wesleys abolitionists and evangelists to workers. They reminded Anglicans that all our lives matter both for care but also for service. Every one of us is worthy of significant service to God. Our personal commitments are as important as the commitments of the church. Like those young adults who want to belong. We make our cathedral’s witness to the world, together.

In the American church, many traditions remember December 31, with a Watch Night service, which we will bring back next year. Watch Night because it was January 1, 1863, that the Emancipation Proclamation became the law. Our ancestors in the faith waited on that night before literally being free under the law, forever, beginning the next day. Our ancestors kept vigil that the blight of enslavement would be ended in this nation. Can you imagine knowing when your freedom would come? What would your prayer have been that night?

Our freedom is in Christ, in whose service, we find true freedom.

I am honored to be with you in service to this mighty witness to God’s love, “a bulwark against brutality,” our Cathedral.

Happy New Year!

The Very Rev. Winnie Varghese
Dean
The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine