No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.
It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left.
It is the nativity of our common Adam.
– Charles Lamb
We come to this new year
naked as dormant branches
in the freezing night.
Mere potential is barely budded,
nothing covered up,
no hiding in shame.
A shared and common birthday,
a still life nativity in a winter garden,
another chance to make it right.
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
– G.K. Chesterton
We hoped for some timely snow for a white Christmas but had to be content with a brief flurry that didn’t stick. Then there was more hope yesterday on New Year’s Eve with more flurries and a few little skiffs left behind here and there, but nothing much. Instead of snow that stuck, we were stuck with the same old muddy bare ground and dead grass and weary frost-bitten plants.
It is natural to desire an easy transformation of the old and dirty to something new and beautiful: an all clean pristine white cottony sheet covering thrown over everything, making it look completely different than before. Similarly, at the tick of the clock past midnight on New Years’ Eve, we hope for just such an inner transformation as well, a fresh start, a leaving behind of the not-so-good from the past and moving ahead to the surely-it’ll-be-better in the future.
But it doesn’t stick, even if there is a flurry of good intentions and a skiff of newness plopped down here and there. Even if we find ourselves in the midst of blizzard conditions, unable to see six inches ahead and immobilized by the furious storms of life, that accumulation eventually will melt, leaving behind even more mud and raw mess.
It isn’t how flawless, how clean, or how new this year will be, but rather how to ensure our soul transformation sticks tight, unmelting from within, even when the heat is turned up and the sweat drips. This is not about a covering thrown over the old and dirty but a full blown overhaul in order to never to be the same again.
I lift my eyes to the hills where the snow stays year round: sometimes more, with a few hundred new inches over several weeks, or sometimes less, on the hottest days of summer. Our new souls this new year must be built of that same resiliency, withstanding what each day may bring, cold or hot.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…within my soul.
“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”
~Frederick Buechner
What went up must come down. It isn’t just a law of physics. It is a reality of Christmas.
True, some houses have multicolored lights strung along their gutters year round, just not illuminated. And I’ve known some people’s artificial trees to stay up until Valentine’s Day or longer. But most of us dismantle what we so lovingly strung up, trimmed and decorated only a month or so ago. It is a sad day taking down Christmas.
As a child I was so reluctant to see the tree come down that I’d cut a sprig of evergreen branch, complete with tinsel, and would put it in a vase of water in my bedroom in order for a small part of Christmas to linger a little longer. By April it would be crispy dry and forgotten and my mother would sneak in and toss it out, without my even missing it.
All the anticipation is spent and our energy wanes. Winter has only begun and now we’re boxing up the twinkling lights and putting away the ribbons and bows. All the fun stuff is tucked away for another year in the garage and attic. Maybe we have the timing of this celebration all wrong. Instead of the Twelve Days of Christmas it should be the Twelve Weeks–the lights should stay up until St. Patrick’s Day at least, just to keep us out of the shadows and doldrums of winter.
Today, as I swept up the last of the grand fir needles that had dropped to the floor, I knew, like the tree that I watered faithfully in the house for two weeks, I too had been drying up and parts of me were being left behind for others to sweep up. There had been the excitement of family brought together from all ends of the earth, friends gathering for meals and games, special church services, but now, some quiet time is sorely needed. The party simply can’t be sustained. The lights have to go off, and the eyes have to close.
So we will now walk into a winter replete with the startling splash of orange red that paints the skies in the evenings, the stark and gorgeous snow covered peaks surrounding us during the day, the grace of bald eagles and trumpeter swans flying overhead, the heavenly lights that twinkle every night, the shining globe that circles full above us, and the loving support of the Hand that rocks us to sleep when we need it.
We don’t need full stockings on the hearth, Christmas villages on the side table, or a music-synced blinking star on the top of the tree to know the comfort of His care and the astounding beauty of His creation, available for us without batteries, electrical plug ins, or the need of a ladder.
Instead of us taking down Christmas, Christmas picks us up.
Every day.
Year round.
(originally written New Year’s Day 2007 and adapted for today, which is starting out far more peacefully–at least so far…)
A split instant can change everything. We all know this, but to truly understand it is another thing. I think I must have been due for the lesson.
Things have been a bit busy on the farm during this past holiday week, in addition to our routine chores and work responsibilities. Add in family gatherings and potlucks with friends, more than usual church events, and the natural expected holiday increase in my hospital work in the drug and alcohol unit, and I have been feeling a bit stretched.
On New Year’s Eve I was at church helping get dinner ready for about four dozen people who were going to stay after worship service to see in the New Year together. I was late to get to the sanctuary to play piano for hymn singing and was hurrying in the dark between buildings when I took a misstep off the edge of the sidewalk and fell forward, crashing right into the concrete steps up to the church. I cracked my forehead a good one. I didn’t get knocked out, but my forehead bore an impressive dent. I had the impending sense of “I’m in trouble now” and fully expected to pass out, but I didn’t. My second thought was “I guess I won’t be playing piano because I’d bleed all over the keys” and then the third thought was “the emergency room doctors are going to think I was falling down drunk on New Year’s Eve.” Nope, stone cold sober~~ just incredibly klutzy. Thankfully I had help right away. My husband took me to the hospital where I got stitched up with some 30 sutures and no evidence of a skull fracture. The ER staff who I know very well because they call me regularly to care for their detox patients, teased me relentlessly about “one of the deepest forehead lacs seen yet on New Year’s Eve”. Needless to say today I have quite a headache and will have a pretty nasty scar that will add a few new lines to my forehead but am grateful that I didn’t do more damage to myself.
Once I got home from ER, thinking the worst was over, my husband and two out of three kids started in with vomiting and diarrhea during the night. I have to say this is impeccable timing for the stomach virus that has been passing through our community to hit our family and they are all still miserably sick. I sit here wondering when my turn is coming. Happy New Year!
Times like this require a sense of humor and some perspective about the potential reasons why I needed a knock on the head:
This incident has proven that I am as hard headed as people regularly describe me. Concrete did not win against this noggin. I’m ashamed to say I’ll be even prouder now about my thick skull.
The plastic surgeon told me he’d need to stretch my skin on my forehead a bit to create an even wound closure, so when I raise my eyebrows or furrow my brow, I won’t have the same number of symmetric wrinkles once it is healed. Ah, too bad. He offered to stretch up the other side too while he was at it and I turned him down flat. In fact he told me to not furrow or raise my eyebrow while it is healing–hah, try that for a day under these circumstances!
I knew there was a reason I still wear bangs at age 52. Now I have justification.
This proves that it doesn’t take being under the influence to do something this stupid, unless the “influence” is congenital awkwardness.
Okay, I can try to make light of it but it is not always possible to understand how a split second can change a life, or even take a life. I am just not able to wrap my brain, protected as it is by my thick skull, around how bad things can happen to us when we least expect them. I do know that my travails are puny and pitiful compared to what some people face every day. My sister’s husband died instantly falling off a ladder last August. A good friend was hit from behind while biking home from work, and is now, months later, only beginning to walk again.
I got off easily with a bruised swollen face.
My son Nate showed me lyrics to a song his college choir sung in concert recently, written by a perfectly healthy 24 year old high school music director, Layton DeVries, from Lansing, Michigan a few weeks before he died as a result of injuries in a car accident. He could never have known what was coming so soon for him, yet he had an understanding far beyond his years. I am grateful to Layton that his words are reassuring to me this morning, the first rather traumatic day of a New Year which is blessed despite all that is happening to me and around me.
“O child, child of God, rest assured, the Lord is with you.
When you wake up in the morning and the sun is shining down, the Lord watches over every step you take.
When the world has knocked you down and you don’t know which way to turn, rest assured, the Lord is with you.
When your friends have turned against you and you feel all alone, the Lord watches over every move you make.
He will always be right there to protect and love his child, rest assured, the Lord is with you.
When darkness drifts around you, and your eyes close in sleep, the Lord watches over every breath you take.
And when death comes near to bring you home, you have no need to fear.
Rest assured, the Lord is with you. “
Barnstorming 