At
the Turning of the Year
Rev. Mark
Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
12/31/05 & 1/1/06
“There
is no pause in the march of the universe, no
breathless moment of silence among created
things that the passage of another twelve months
may be noted.”
--Hamilton Wright Mabie
Reading
“This
Year” by Max Coots
A
year’s a year!
A
string of kindergarten beads strung
once-upon-a-time;
Of flighty minutes for clocks to tsk-tsk about,
And days in simple black-and-white conformity.
For
clocks and calendars it’s so.
My
time is something else again:
Minutes sometimes hours long,
And days of seconds or eternities.
On
calendars the seasons march in apt procession
across
neat-numbered months.
For
me, and others of my ilk, the seasons are not
just
holidays of green or white.
I
sometimes sense some stronger seasons in myself,
Where
time is rearranged as something clocks could
never tell:
Where
Winter sometimes starts in June and leaves grow
gold
in Spring;
When
light is long or short in spite of sun,
And
Winter comes when grass is green except in me.
The
village clock keeps time as time should be,
Bu I
blaspheme Old Chronos with months I make and
seasons
centered in myself.
My
year:
A year that is my life--
A life that is my time--
My time that ought to be eternity enough.
Reading
A
quote from columnist Ellen Goodman:
“We
spend January 1 walking through our lives, room
by room, drawing up a list of work to be done,
cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to
balance the list, we ought to walk through the
rooms of our lives, not looking for flaws, but
for potential.”
Sermon
For
two years in the early nineties, I spent my
weekdays delivering singing telegrams. It was a
silly job that paid the bills and left me with
many stories, enough to fill several sermons, I
am sure. Today, however, I don’t intend
to dwell on my time as a costumed messenger
bearing balloons and tunes. In fact, I
probably wouldn’t be telling you about
telegram work today at all if I hadn’t been
reminded of it the other night, when my father
told me that, for his birthday this week, his
wife had arranged a visit by a balloon-toting
song-stylist named Dr. FeelGood. Now,
unlike the young woman who I’m sure didn’t
get paid enough to visit my father, I didn’t
make many scantily-clad visits to my
victims. In fact, when scared subjects
would ask if I were one of those “stripper”
delivery men, I was always quick to assure them
that I would be keeping my clothes on.
“I’m paid to entertain people” I
would quip.
I
wore a lot of ridiculous costumes during my work
for Balloon-EE-Toons, but none was more
ridiculous than “Baby New Year.” I don’t
remember why in the world someone would have
sent “Baby New Year” to a friend or loved
one…kind of tough to figure out a motivation
for that choice…but I definitely remember
putting on the costume: a diaper, with pink
leotard and tights, a brightly colored sash,
baby bonnet and a giant pacifier. Sight
gag, all the way.
Too
bad I still don’t have the costume or I might
have it on today. You see, wearing it
would create the perfect New Year’s mood for
our service. Now I wouldn’t stand before
you in a diaper to simply burden you with a
grotesque image to start the new year.
Rather, I would do it because having your
minister lead a service dressed as Baby New Year
would be the absurd equivalent of the
significance that has been placed on this rather
arbitrary annual moment in time…this human
construction…this one day set apart from the
rest of the year as a time of unique beginnings
and endings, as if every day weren’t filled
with beginnings and endings…this one New Year’s
Day…a sight gag all the way, we might say.
The
tradition of New Year’s Day can be traced back
at least 4000 years to the ancient Babylonians,
who celebrated the New Year at the first new
moon after the vernal equinox. Having the
new year begin during spring, a natural time of
rebirth, made a lot of sense…particularly
because one of the common new year’s
resolutions of the ancient Babylonians was the
return of borrowed farm equipment (…probably a
lot easier to do than quitting smoking or losing
weight!)
However,
basing the new year on a lunar calendar was
problematic because the moon’s phases over
time are not in step with the changing seasons.
So, just over 2000 years ago, Julius Caesar
moved Rome to a solar calendar…establishing
the length of a year as 365 days plus a leap day
every four years. In the 16th
century, Pope Gregory XIII acknowledged that the
seasons were not properly lining up with the
Julian calendar and responded in a dramatic
way: he shortened the year 1582 by a full
ten days, thereby getting the seasons more in
step with the calendar once again. (Can
you imagine ten days being struck from the
calendar? Apparently the populace was not
thrilled with the decision. In fact, many
thought the whole thing was a scam worked by
landlords so that they could get more rent!)
The
Gregorian calendar that we still use today,
then, prevents a future elimination of 10 days
by skipping the leap year every 100 years
(except in years divisible by 400). That’s
why 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000
was. In a few minutes I’ll be handing
out a quiz…
I
share this short historical sketch with you
because I find it fascinating, if not comical,
to consider the human machinations that have
created the calendar that today lays out the
year in those 365 neat little boxes…the
calendar that leads us to consider January 1st
as a day of special importance…a day about
which it is nearly impossible to be indifferent…a
day for humans to celebrate our own mortality,
the fact that time passes and so do we…a kind
of common human birthday and memorial service
all rolled into one…a day not only to
recuperate from the partying the night before…but
a day to stop smoking, or start working out, to
begin to lose ten pounds, or read more, or spend
more time with family, or whatever resolutions
we might be apt to make, if we even bother…and
it’s been questioned by some if we should.
The Register
featured a story last week about the opinion of
at least one doctor who says that New Year’s
resolutions are actually harmful to us because
they set us up for inevitable failure.
Thanks
for the vote of confidence, Doc!
Can
you imagine going into this guy’s office,
telling him that you want to lose weight or
start a more healthy lifestyle and in response
he says, “Ah, don’t bother. You won’t be
able to do it anyway. Here have a Ding Dong.”
Of
course, this pessimistic prognosticator, this
Dr. Don’t-Try-to-Feel-Good, is not the first
person to scoff at the resolution
tradition. Mark Twain described the New
Year’s Day scene this way: “Yesterday,” he
wrote, “everybody smoked his last cigar, took
his last drink and swore his last oath.
Today, we are a pious and exemplary
community. Thirty days from now, we shall
have cast our reformation to the winds and gone
to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably
shorter than ever.” If Mr. Twain
were here today, maybe we could convince him to
lighten up a bit!
OK,
so New Year’s resolutions may be silly. So we’re
doomed to grappling with our shortcomings and
failures no matter what we try to do. Isn’t
that what being human is about? Having
grandiose ideas about bettering ourselves…having
resilience in the face of temptations and
traumas…doing whatever we can to get through
the day and to not be so hard on
ourselves? Sure feels that way to
me. Besides, the likelihood that our
resolutions will fall flat is not a good reason
to avoid them altogether, to convince ourselves
that we shouldn’t bother reflecting upon the
things that have happened this past year and to
make decisions about how we might want to
approach the year to come more
thoughtfully. I do think it would be good
to have a sense of humor about it all, though…and
to open ourselves to the possibility of a New
Year’s Day that is not tied to January 1st,
but one that maybe starts next Thursday, or on a
Tuesday in March, or a Sunday in November…whenever
we are ready…and maybe even when we don’t
think we are.
I don’t
typically make resolutions on New Year’s Eve…at
least not the New Year’s Eve of the Gregorian
calendar. Rather, I find that I tend to
make resolutions on other New Year’s Days, the
New Year’s Days that happen by grace, chance,
or choice throughout the year, the New Year’s
Days that occur any time I am inspired to
reconsider old habits or begin new ones, any day
I have the opportunity to translate the
particulars of my situation into a new
understanding, any day I receive the gift of
seeing my life anew. These days arrive for all
of us now and again, sometimes several times in
12 months, sometimes only once in three
years. Thee New Year’s Days usually
arrive on the wings of unexpected
circumstances: new arrivals in our circles
of family or friends…a transformative book, or
quote, or piece of art…sudden illness or loss…a
particularly beautiful day or a night sky full
of stars…falling in or out of love...a painful
memory or abusive situation that we just can’t
stand to endure anymore…hitting bottom in our
battle with an addiction…a simple conversation
or encounter that opens us to a way of looking
at life that we may have never
considered. These are
the means by which we experience the real New
Year’s Days of our lives…the days when we
have reason to reflect upon, listen to, and
learn from life…and to be inspired to
appreciate and apply the wisdom that comes from
the gift that is living itself.
Don’t
feel there is enough time in a day to be
thoughtful about life? You’ll be glad to
know that this weekend, the good folks at the
International Earth Rotation and Reference
Systems Service are delaying the start of the
new year by adding a second to the world’s atomic clocks.
I know this sounds like a plot line from Superman,
and I don’t pretend to understand it, but
apparently this timing tweak is necessary to
make up for changes in the Earth’s rotation,
changes caused by many factors, including ocean
tides. The second will be added at the
stroke of midnight of “Coordinated Universal
Time” which coincides with midnight in
London. So our extra second will take
place tonight [New Year’s Eve] at 6pm.
Do you have plans yet?
A
second doesn’t seem like much…just a blink
of an eye…but it is a start…and, in the end,
a second is really all any of us needs to make
the switch to look at life anew, to open
ourselves to the New Year always waiting to be
found…always waiting. Oscar Wilde wrote
that “When you really want love, you will find
it waiting for you.” I think the same
could be said about the New Year…indeed about
life itself. “When you really want a new
year, when you really want new life, you will
find it waiting for you.”
So
Happy New Year to each of us, whenever it may
begin…and may there be several more to come…even
when we least expect them. Especially when
we least expect them.