“Turning Years into Life”

A Sermon by the Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 6 January 2008

I have chosen for our readings today a couple of readings that I hope will help focus our hearts and our minds and our souls on the New Year.  The first is a poem by Mary Oliver and the second is a verse of scripture from the New Testament.  First, the poem.

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 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?

And from the Gospel of John, Chapter 10, Verse 10:

                                     I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

On New Year's Day, I finally made it to the gym for the first time in three months, determined to get fit in the New Year.  In fact, I didn't just go to the gym on New Year's; I actually joined a new gym on New Year's Day because, obviously it was the old gym's fault that I never worked out.  [Laughter]  At the gym on New Year's, I ran into a parishioner who admitted that he hadn't been to the gym in a long while either.  "New Year's resolution?" he asked.  "Yup," I said.  And we shared with one another the sheepish looks of people who, just twelve hours into the New Year, could already sense that our days as regular gym-goers were numbered.  [Laughter]

And such is the case, I fear, with many of our New Year's resolutions.  Somehow they always seem like a good idea when we make them, hastily concocting them and confidently pronouncing them during our New Year's cheer.  But I'll tell you, when you're just seven minutes into your 45-minute Stairmaster workout, suddenly it doesn't seem like such a good idea any more, and we cry to ourselves, "What was I thinking?"  What was I thinking?  Now don't get me wrong; I don't want to burst the bubble of good intention and firm resolve that courses through us during these heady days of early January.  It's not as though I'm opposed to our secular rituals of resolution-making.  But I do think that perhaps we could make this time of year more meaningful if we infused it with a more reflective and spiritually-grounded approach to renewal and resolution.

You might be surprised to know that our 19th Century Unitarian ancestors took the New Year very seriously as a milestone of the spiritual life.  You see, they tended to see life as a kind of pilgrimage, a journey of great significance.  While the orthodox of the same generation dismissed this life as a veil of tears, as mere preparation for heaven, the Unitarians distinguished themselves by finding religious significance in this life, in this world, in their lives.  They believed they'd been put on earth for a purpose; they saw their life journey as the path toward achieving that purpose.  If life was a journey for our ancestors, then New Year's represented a kind of milestone on that journey, a cairn, if you will.  Those of us who are hikers know what a cairn is, right?  A cairn is a little pile of stones that we sometimes see along the trail -- or maybe a marker of some sort -- that marks a turning point, or a crossroads in the trail, a decision point.  If you're a hiker you know that when you come to a cairn on the path it's usually a good idea to let your pack down and sit down and maybe take a sip of water and eat some trail mix, take out your map and figure out where exactly you've come from and where it is that you’re going.  A time of reorientation, to make sure you're still headed in the right direction.  That's what New Year's was for our ancestors, a kind of milestone, a reckoning point on life's journey.

I see something like this kind of reckoning in our first reading this morning in the poem.  It's not a poem about New Year's but it is a poem about someone who's out on a journey in the wilderness who pauses for a moment because a little creature, a grasshopper, has fluttered across her path.  So she ends up getting right down on her knees, to examine the creature.  And her meditation leads her into consideration of life and its meaning and its purpose.  Let's hear, one more time, part of those words from Mary Oliver:  "I don't know exactly what 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've 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?"

Now that seems to me to be the kind of question that we should be asking ourselves in the New Year.  How will we spend our precious days?  Another year has gone.  Each of us, every one of us, is another year closer to the end of our lives, whenever that will come.  We would do well to ask ourselves whether we're spending our days, spending our years, the way we want to be, the way we should be.

Now, to help their congregants evaluate and discern how they were coming along on life's journey, 19th Century Unitarian preachers often made an important distinction in their New Year's sermons, a distinction between time elapsed and life lived.  At the end of the year, ministers asked their congregations if the year had merely passed them by or if they had actually lived it.  Emerson put a fine point on it when he, one Sunday, asked his congregation, "Are you living or are you merely growing old?"  Are you merely growing old?  There's a difference, isn't there?  Seems to me to be a difference between quantity and quality.  Getting older means that a certain quantity of time has passed us by; living means that we've brought something to our days.  We haven't just made it through the year; we've brought something to the year.  We've lived it fully; we've lived it purposefully.  We've lived it intentionally.  We didn't just let history happen to us; we shaped it by our response to it.

In the little passage from the Gospel of John that I shared with you earlier, I think that Jesus is trying to get at this same distinction.  Jesus says, "I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly."  He didn't say I have come so that they can be born and get old and get tired and die, but that they might have life abundant.  I love that word "abundant;" it's such a wonderful word.  It means plentiful and bountiful, rich and overflowing.  It doesn't mean that life doesn't bring us sorrow or pain, or that everything's going to come up roses.  It means that our life should be filled with those things that matter most to us -- love, companionship, beauty, joy, giving ourselves to something larger than ourselves.  These are some of the things that make life abundant.

Are you living abundantly, or are you merely growing old?  With all these things to consider, our Unitarian ancestors did not rush to their New Year’s resolutions.  There was an important first step that they saw, the step of not looking forward but looking back, the step of reflection.  To pause and to reflect on the year that has passed because that's one of the ways we convert years into life, by reflecting on the year that's past, by trying to understand the lessons it has taught us.  What have we learned?  How have we changed?  What were our losses?  What were our joys?  What is it that you want to carry forward with you into the New Year?  And what is better off left behind?  New Year's was a time to step back and to kind of get a big picture on life.  The Unitarian poet, E.E. Cummings, has a nice little poem about how our lives can become little if we don't let the big picture in.  It goes like this:

                            Little man, in a hurry, full of an important worry, halt, stop, relax, wait.

                            Little child who have tried, who have failed, who have cried,

lie bravely down, sleep

                            Big rain, big snow, big sun, big moon, enter us.

The New Year can be a time for the big things in life to enter into our consciousness and set us aright.  And then, and only then, after we've taken that time for reflection, did our forebears say that it was time to go ahead, to make our resolutions for the New Year, except that in the 19th Century, Unitarians didn't call them resolutions.  They had another word for it; it was a fancy theological word and that word was "consecration."  Consecration, which meant to dedicate oneself to a holy or a sacred purpose.  Not resolution, but consecration.  And I think there are at least a couple of reasons that we would do well to think of, even if we don’t use that word, to think of our resolutions more in the sense of consecration.  I think there are at least two advantages to that way of thinking about them. 

The first one brings me back to another little story from the gym on New Year's Day. When I was there at the gym, I went over to the water fountain and there was a little tip sheet, put on the wall right by the water fountain. And I started reading it to try to procrastinate before getting back to the Stairmaster. It was a tip sheet on how to keep your New Year's resolutions. And God bless it, it was trying to be helpful. But one of the things it said was to pick something easy for the New Year’s resolution, as if we fail to achieve our resolutions because we set the bar too high. Well that may be true sometimes, but I actually think that the reason we don’t achieve our resolutions is that a lot of times they are not worthy of our high resolve. Our ancestors used the word “consecration” because in the New Year they thought to rededicate themselves to a holy purpose in their life, to an ultimate purpose in their lives, something big, something important, something worthy of their lives. And maybe if we recommitted ourselves to something worthy of our lives in the New Year, we would be more successful at keeping our New Years’ promises. A promise worthy of our lives.

The other advantage that this idea of consecration had over the notion of resolution was this: If it was a consecration, you didn’t have to do it all by yourself. You see, to resolve to do something is an act of the individual will alone. But to consecrate one’s self to a holy purpose is to enter into partnership with a divine power, with the spirit of life. It is that God of possibility. Do you remember that sermon back in December, that Sunday when we talked about the God of possibility, the God who identified God’s self by saying “I will be who I will be?” The God who can imagine the greatest possible future out of the broken present. That includes the greatest possible future for our lives. Our ancestors believed that they were entering into partnership with that God of possibility by consecrating themselves, by dedicating themselves to a holy, and a worthy, purpose. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel as though our individual wills just aren’t strong enough to get the job done. Partnership. Consecration allows some room for grace. And we all need some grace in this New Year.

So friends, on this first Sunday of the New Year, let me leave you with these questions: Are you living, or are you merely growing old? And what is it that you plan to do with your one, your one, one, wild, precious life? May you live it richly. May you live it purposefully. May you live it lovingly. May you live it abundantly. Amen.