The first of January is another day dawning, the sun rising as the sun always rises, the earth moving in its rhythms, with or without a certain as the day of new beginning, separating the old from the new. So it is: everything is the same, bound into its history as we ourselves are bound.
Yet we also stand at a threshold, the new year something truly new, still unformed, leaving a stunning power in our hands:
What shall we do with this great gift of Time, this year?
Let us begin by remembering that whatever justice, whatever peace and wholeness might bloom in our world this year, we are the hearts and minds, the hands and feet, the embodiment of all the best visions of our people.
The year can be new ground for the seeds of our dreams. Let us take the step forward, together, onto new ground, planting our dreams well, faithfully, and in joy.By now you know the drill -- we've looked at the first and second paragraphs already. Today, let's look at the third which is, I believe, the most important of them all:
What shall we do with this great gift of Time, this year?Whether you think of this reading as pertinent particularly to he beginning of the new calendar year, or the beginning of any new chapter of a person's life, this question is one of the most fundamental we can possibly consider.
Mary Oliver's poem, 'The Summer Day," lifts up this same question while also pointing rather clearly toward an answer. (Her death this year truly was a great loss. I know many people who have experienced her writings as, if you will, contemporary scripture.)
The Summer DaySo, tell me ...
Who made the world?Who made the swan, and the black bear?Who made the grasshopper?This grasshopper, I mean --
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Pax tecum,
RevWik
