New Year’s Day Service 2006
Rev. Arthur G. Severance
Two traditional New Year’s Toasts:
1. As you slide down the banisters of life, may the splinters never point the wrong way.
- Irish toast *
2. "May all your troubles during the coming year be as short as your New Year's resolutions."
The new year always means that we are a year older. About 30 years ago I wrote a story about an old man who sent his mirror to be replaced because he didn’t believe in its reflection of his aging. Who knew anything about aging in their 20’s!
“There was once an old man who lived by himself. If truth be told, he was a very selfish man, self-centered and even stingy. He was not a happy man and always seem to find someone else to blame his problems on. So it was that he mailed his only mirror in the house back to the company which had made it many years ago and was still in business.
“To whom it may concern,” the letter read, “I am returning this mirror because it is obviously flawed. It no longer reflects correctly, making me look much older than I am. The mirror’s reflection has obviously aged more quickly than I. I no longer recognize the face reflected in this mirror. Please send me one which will more accurately reflect what I really look like, and which will not make me look quite so old.”
Sometimes I am that person. How about you? Is your mirror’s reflection aging just a little too fast for your, liking? Surely, then we just need new mirrors, or of course, we could learn to live with the unassailable fact that we are all aging. Oh some faster and worse than others, but change is inevitable. From my home state of NH I bear the sad tidings that the Old Man of the Mountains, the symbol seen on every NH road sign and license plate, is no more. Gravity and weather won. Yes. The rocks making up the Old Man of the Mountains a few years ago tumbled to their death, erasing the ancient face.
It makes me think of folksinger, Tom Rush’s, great song “The Circle Game,” with that wonderful refrain:
“And the seasons
they go round and round
painted ponies go up and down
We’re captives on the carousel of
time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind from where we came-
And go round and round in the circle game.”
When I turned 50 I added a verse or two to the same tune
. He knows now there are many years to come
and fears not future, pines not
for the past
He’s learned that love will live
when we are done
And it’s the journey not the end is our task.
Think for a minute. Where were you on New Year’s Eve, 1983? Could you believe that the future had arrived and the next day would start the dreaded Orwellian year, 1984. But that, of course, was in the last century!
Or how about your choice of 2 millennium New Years eve celebrations, for 2000 and also 2001. I wrote this poem End of the World Skeptical Blues”
I light the incense and brace myself
called by holy forces
I can not begin to understand, measure,
or name-
to a promethean struggle
to hold back the coming millennium
almost as if I heard a still small voice
within
almost as if I was a I true believer
rather than a faithful doubter, a loving,
hoping, skeptic
that somehow,
in this unfathomable and immeasurable universe
I might be of any consequence at all-
less than a blip on a time radar screen,
smaller than a nanosecond in the clock of life
while swimming in paradox lake as the sun
goes down
and the sky of my life
like a closing movie shot
turns deep colors of pink and purple, red,
yell, blue, white,
then all is black
the comfort of night has fallen.
The Story of My life, as interconnected with you
whoever you are that hear or read this-
Tonight’s New Year’s Eve of
the new Millennium 2000,
But only if you believe that we can start at 0.
The story of my life as connected with
family,
children I have helped raise and love so
dearly
even as they are growing up and away.
Wife of my heart and mother of our children,
I will have to admit it.
I am the most important character
of all time,
but only to me.
and only in connection with you.
I am a motherless child now yet still exist,
though somehow diminished.
I have been a fatherless child for the
last 25 years
and somewhat diminished.
And on this great and world transforming eve,
I will leap into tomorrow
into the arms of love and life itself
into a trust in tomorrow, a love for today
,and a blessed memory of yesterday.
Would I change my life if I had it to live
over?
A stupid question, really;
as if we could be hypothetical about our past.
It is as useless a question as, “do
you believe in God?”
And I always, it all depends, doesn’t
it?
or even rabbinically answer with a question:
“Why do you ask?
What are you hoping to find out about
me by that awful question.”
Come, let us hold hands, close our eyes,
hope for the best, pray for the rest
,
and then leap boldly
into the great time chasm of tomorrow,
next year, next century, next millennium,
next life.
Hope is Often Rented
by the Year
Hope is often rented by the year.
A ceremony helps ensure the signing.
People like transitions to be clear,
Preferably at moments when they're dining.
Yet as a rental flat can be a home,
No one wants to terminate this lease.
Each thinks hope too poor a risk to own
While needing its bright arc for inner
peace.
Years therefore start with hope again renewed
Even as the old year's wishes die.
After all the books have been reviewed,
Ring in the New Year!--with a gentle sigh.
Nicholas Gordon
The future does not look good. There is war, terrorism, famine, natural disasters, cancer, and oh so many problems today, yet each new year is a new opportunity to change the world, to start, perhaps, by changing ourselves where we can and learning to live with ourselves for those parts seemingly unchangeable. Sometimes we are so wrapped up in our own worlds that we forget the larger world to which we are also attached. We must find our own way of helping, even if it is to raise our children for the peace and justice that they may carry on from us. There is always hope, always great potential born every new year’s day. Our aging mirror reflects just the outside of us that has changed; it cannot reflect our striving still for the right and the just, our inner spiritual searching, our daily battle to keep on ion the face of all the problems of the world.
Karan Sing, Member of Parliament, India-from Prayers for a Thousand Years Blessings and Expressions of Hope for the New Millennium.
“The golden Thread of spiritual realization that links together all the great religious traditions of the world needs to be strengthened. So that vas we enter the new millennium, we can shed the baggage of fanaticism, fundamentalism, and bigotry that so cruelly distorted the 20th century, and move into a new dimension of an integrated human being living in an harmonious global society.
The Vedas, the most ancient living scriptures of the human race, teach this entire cosmos is permeated by the divine power, and that each human being encapsulates a spark of divinity. Fanning the spark into the blazing fire of spiritual realization is one of the major goals of human existence. The other is to work for the welfare of all beings-human as well as non human. We must raise the level of human consciousness to comprehend the tremendous creative potentialities of the human mind and spirit.”
Let us together make it a good year, the best we’ve ever had.
Shalom
Copyright © 2006 Arthur G. Severance. All rights reserved.