Call to Worship
I am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that I catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what I said to myself
about myself
when I was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
I am running into a new year
and I beg what I love and
I leave to forgive me
–Lucille Clifton
As we gather here on the cusp of a new year, let’s us give thanks that we are here together. And may we make a space here to know what is stirring for each of us as we cross over this threshold.
Come, now, and let us worship together.
Homily
In just a couple days will be the turning of the year. It will also be the turning of the decade—or at least it will be for some. Others will remind us that the actual turning of the decade won’t happen until a year from now, with the arrival of 2021.
However we might mark the year and the decade, a new year does offer a chance for a new beginning. A change in habit. A new start. That’s where that impulse for resolutions comes in. it is a time to mark and to make change.
What we know is that more often than not that the change doesn’t usually last long. Those resolutions often go by the wayside in a few days, maybe a few weeks at most. It is a testament to just how set our patterns in life can become—and how difficult it can be to get ourselves into some new pattern.
Sometimes I wonder if part of the problem with resolutions tend to be pretty ambitious. Not to lose 10 pounds but 50. Not to get rid of some stuff but almost all of it. Sometimes those things we want to change may need to be broken down into parts and we work on those parts one by one. Or we need to figure out just how we live out those resolutions in the longer term.
This coming year is going to be a big one, especially from the perspective of our country with the presidential election—and a difficult one if the last couple years are any indication. I expect we will feel pulled in all kinds of directions, between hope and cynicism, between compassion and despair. And finding some sense of grounding will not be easy at all. I know for me all too often when I feel pulled in all kinds of directions I can quickly get to that place of not quite knowing where to begin. What to do. And sometimes I think this is the point where our impulse can be to simply withdraw. But these are times when we all need to be involved. But we don’t need to do it all. Truth is we don’t have to take on all the burdens of the world—but hopefully we can find a way to know and discern just what our place in all of it might be.
So what would that grounding look like for us? That’s an individual question for each of us. What I’m imagining is a need for a kind of spiritual practice heading into the year. A spiritual practice is something we do on a regular basis that helps us connect to our core, the things that are most important to us. It is something that hopefully can keep us grounded and that will sustain us through the long haul.
Now I know that sometimes hearing the words spiritual practice can sound like something that needs to be complicated and take a long time but that is not necessarily the case. You don’t have to be in an uncomfortable kneeling position for an hour meditating or praying the whole time. It might be as simple as a daily gratitude practice where you call to mind what you are grateful for. It might be saying a mantra every day that helps to focus you on the change you want to see in your life and in the world. It may be a commitment to a daily practice of getting out with your dog or finding a sense of grounding in some other way.
The story Bill told us earlier[1] about the beginning of the world and the sharing of the light is a reminder that we don’t need to take it all on but to discern what our part of that healing of the world might look like. Perhaps part of what that spiritual practice might help us to do is to know how our own part of that healing—to know how it is all connected up together.
Now I also want to say here that another thing that can get in the way is that we want things to be perfect. We want everything to be tied up in a pretty package with a neat bow. And, we know, that life doesn’t tend to be that way most of the time.
Our job, I think, is to make space to see ourselves in relation to the whole and to recognize just how tied together our lives and the lives of those around us are. Our task is to first recognize that and then to move out of that place. The truth is that getting to where we want and need to be can sometimes take a long time and almost always asks us to do so in relationship with others.
I think we need to find a way to see our own wholeness—in the gifts we have and yes, even in all the ways that we fall short. We then start from that place. We live with a faith that what we have will be enough. But first and foremost we see that we are good and whole just the way we are.
The writer Rachel Naomi Remen tells of an experience she had growing up.
When she was in the third grade she had taken an IQ test and did quite well. This meant that she was placed in a class for gifted students. Her teacher had told her that being in her special class meant that she and the other students in the class were brighter than most other people. Well she and her mother are walking in the midst of a crowd in the middle of New York City when she announces her mother that she is indeed smarter than most of the people passing them on the street. Her mother stops immediately and kneels down so that she and her daughter were at eye level. As the crowd flows around them she tells her daughter that every one of the people around them had some secret wisdom; each of them knew something more about how to live, about being happy, about loving more than she did.
Remen looks up at the people passing by and they were all adults. She asks her mother if it is because they are all grown-ups. And her mother says no. She tells her daughter that it will always be this way. It is how things are. Everyone has some special gift to share. And Remen says in that moment she wanted all of the people to be her friends.
She writes that the story seemed to go the way of many childhood lessons, it was not something that she remembered. Many years go by and then one night, not long after she had become a physician, she had a dream.
She is standing in the threshold of a door. She seems to have been standing there for a long time. People are passing through the door. She cannot see where they are going or where they have come from, but somehow that does not seem to matter. She meets them one at a time in the doorway. As they pass through they stop and look into her face for a moment and hand her something, each one something different. They say, “Here, here is something for you to keep.” And they go on.
Remen writes: “and I feel enormously grateful. Perhaps we are all standing in such a doorway. Some people pass through it on their way to the rest of their lives—lives that we may never know or see. Others pass through it to their deaths and the Unknown. But everyone leaves something behind. When I awoke from this dream, I had a sense of the value of every life.”[2]
So what is our job—individually and collectively—what is our job as we look to a new year?
One reminder from the story—a reminder I think we can all use sometimes—is to begin with some humility. That is usually a good and important place to start. Our job first of all is to be present in the world and always working to see the world as it is and as it might be.
And Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jungian psychoanalyst, writes:
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
She continues, “Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.”[3]
All it takes is a single spark that catches to make a big difference.
We are living in some complicated times and it would be easy heading into the new year to be overwhelmed and not know where to begin. But the truth is that all of our voices and all of our efforts are needed and we really don’t have the luxury to be overwhelmed. I think we are called to approach the year grounded however we can be grounded.
The poet e.e. cummings once wrote, “we can never be born enough.” We can never be born enough. The spirit, over and over again, calls us into life. Part of life’s journey is to learn and grow and change—in ways that invite us into more learning and changing and growing. At the core of coming together here is a chance that we might look for what is possible together and to know that we are not alone on the journey.
What if we looked at the new year—what if we looked at every day—as an invitation, to be born again and again? What is it we choose to do with the blank page that we are offered every day?
We live in times that ask much of us. We are asked to be open to what the spirit might be calling us to do—to have courage, and perseverance, and openness. We are asked to pay attention to what might be emerging.
We are asked to practice how we might be in the world, to live in right relationship with ourselves, with others with the earth. We may be asked to use our gifts in ways we haven’t used them before.
May this new year offer us an invitation. May we say yes to that invitation each and every day and may that yes lead us to places we can’t even imagine. Amen.
I want to close with words from poet John O’Donohue, “For a New Beginning.”
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
Benediction
Resolve to
remember that you can never be born enough. In this new year—in all your
days—may you make it a practice to give thanks, and to say yes.
[1] https://onbeing.org/programs/rachel-naomi-remen-the-difference-between-fixing-and-healing-nov2018/
[2] Rachel Naomi Remen, “My Grandfather’s Blessings,” Riverhead Books, 2000, pp 66-67.
[3] http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=548
Topics: Birth