http://www.firstchurchboston.org/eeuploads/sermons/Revolving_Resolutions_30-_Dec-07_RT.pdf
I secretly like New Year’s Eve the most out of all the holidays. That’s right, as unbelievable as it may seem, even before gift-bearing traditions, the birth of a child, the miracle of lamp oil or even a remembrance of the pilgrims, I pick New Year’s as my holiday of choice.
Now this may seem a strange but I am, as many of you know, a diehard planner. And the New Year is the planner’s golden opportunity. In fact, beginning in September as I browse the school calendars, I begin to fantasize about this New Year.
It was Charles Lamb who said, “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.” Indeed, there is something powerful about the newness of January 1st.
And it’s so tempting to imagine the clean sheet of paper dropping before your eyes, a whole new year with a whole new me! Part of it, I am sure is due to the excitement of a new semester of classes as a student, but I think we are all a bit captivated by the promise of a new year. The holidays can be exhausting, and our homes are filled with gifts and guests and leftovers. The New Year is a chance to clean out—to take a breath, and try something different from the chaos and clutter of the last few weeks.
I recently picked up a copy of U.S. News & World Report perusing the “50 Ways to Improve Your Life in 2008.” The answers? #7 Bite into dark chocolate (unfortunately it doesn’t say to eat it) #21 Put a freeze on identity theft, #43 Visit Shea Stadium or Yankee Stadium before they’re gone (I won’t question their journalistic bias against Fenway). As the list goes on it becomes clear that even at its silliest points, and most serious resolutions: We need New Year’s as surely as we need the holidays that proceed it and follow.
And, as with any good holiday commercial America is eager to greet this season with solutions. There are dozens of weight-loss plans and gym memberships. Discount admissions to writing and pottery classes. Of course, you could learn a new language, or read a book about being a better you- a fitter, more environmentally friendly, economically responsible, fair-trade conscious, super-organized, ultra-healthy, well-informed and equally rejuvenated you.
And if that’s not exciting enough consider that once the resolution is made, the only thing left to accomplish is a simple membership or admission or class entrance then the cling of glasses and the landslide into 2008.
So very simple… Almost.
And in some ways it is simple, right?, the resolution-making until January 3rd or maybe even February 15th when the collective amnesia sinks in. The shiny newness of 2008 will begin to wear off—yes even the thrill of writing the date on a check or purchasing a new calendar will begin to fade.
Soon, it will be just another year not a miracle of transformation.
We forget so easily—I forget so easily, the promises made on December 31st and the hope just ‘round the corner.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about December 31st, 1999.
I have to admit on that eve of the millennium I was a little apprehensive. Do you remember it? The predictions that super computers would fail, international trade and the stock market stop, the world entering the chaos of electronic shutdown.
It was an event we anticipated, and Prince ushered us in urging us to party like it’s 1999. While I didn’t party like it was 1999, I remember pausing-- holding my breath as that ball fell and the lights proclaimed it was the year 2000 with Dick Clark. Never mind, that we would again worry the next year when everyone realized the millennium didn’t actually begin until 2001. But that was worry for another year.
It seems every decade or so, someone is worried the world is about to end. Charles Schulz, the American cartoonist, once chided us “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.”
And like, Schulz I am not too worried about the world ending-at least not today, tomorrow, or this Tuesday. But I do worry about the collective cultural amnesia that we seem to suffer every couple of years around New Year’s.
In the interim between the predictions of doomsday from Nostradamus and the latest international threat we find ourselves making resolutions. Trying new diets and exercise equipment, perhaps a dance class. We begin a journal practice or start going to church, or make some “attack plan” for how this coming year we will reinvent ourselves.
We seek new selves, often neglecting our old selves and the rich history they could bring to this new page of 2008. Our resolutions carefully revolve around the one piece of our humanity we so often neglect—our memories.
More than any life changing transformation, this time of year is about reflecting upon those memories that have made us who we are, those memories that perhaps haunt us in 2008, and those that urge us to great the New Year.
In this morning’s reading from Chris Hedges we learn about how our lives circle back to us in memory. Have you ever found yourself returning to a piece of your identity? Revisiting or building upon an aspect of who you were years ago in someone else’s eyes? Chris Hedges finds himself preaching, though he is not a preacher, just as his father saw him so many years ago. He finds meaning in this memory, and the assurance he needs to climb into the pulpit as a writer, protestor, and social reformer.
This past week I went to Upstate New York to visit my family. We went over to my grandfather’s house in search of tax returns and socks he needed at the rehab facility he is staying in as he heals from a back injury. Inside a drawer next to his desk, I found a card, with the words “Dad” written on the front of the envelope. It was a Father’s Day card from my mother when she was about eight. Showing it to her, she smiled and instantly I could see in her eyes the memory of a man I’ve never met. A man who lifted her up with his strong arms swinging her over his shoulders, a man who carefully led her in the polka on her wedding, and who held me in his arms when I was born.
This is the power of memory, when a sacred story about ourselves can be held in the vessel of someone’s mind. Yes, we get off track, we age, we forget, but memory remains sacred. It survives the ones we love, it survives our failures, it even survives our resolutions that never escape the journal pages we write upon. Hal Borland once said that “Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.” I believe that wisdom is carried in the carriage of our memories. New Year’s is indeed the feast of memory as sure as it is the celebration of resolution.
So it is we await the New Year, sitting in vigil for our memories. James Matthew Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, once said that “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
Memory urges us on when the appeal of our resolution seems distant, or we are too afraid to step before the audience, attempt the new class, challenge the memory of who we have been. To smell roses in December.
While my passion for this holiday remains, I suppose this year I’ve lost a bit of the illusion of the blank page—of a fresh start. I think it is naïve to attempt to wipe everything clean, as Chris Hedges warns for that to erase our memories is to deny the very essence of our existence.
Watching the commercials on TV this past week, reading the ads and newspapers it seems being a new me, a new self erases our memory. Our culture is increasingly in favor of the new to the old. Shiny new cars are much better than their older counterparts, fit young bodies preferred on the TV to those that show the evidence of living and aging. But what truth lives in a wrinkle? What truth hides beneath the mistakes, the imperfections, upon the pages already written?
I recently found a poem by William Stafford entitled Turn Over Your Hand. Stafford writes:
Those lines on your palm, they can be read
for a hidden part of your life that only
those links can say—nobody’s voice
can find so tiny a message as comes
across your hand. Forbidden to complain,
you have tried to be like somebody else,
and only this fine record you examine
sometimes like this can remember where
you were going before that long
silent evasion that your life became.
I look at my palm, the lines I cannot erase, the memory of all the past resolutions the places and promises of the new years before 1999 and all that followed after. I think this is the trick to the New Year’s resolution, to getting it right (if there is such a thing)-- seek a resolution drawn in the lines of your palm. Circle back to the memories of who you were and who you are called to be—returning to that elemental moment when someone else saw a piece of yourself that perhaps you did not know was waiting within your soul.
After we grabbed the socks that afternoon in my grandfather’s house, (without so much luck with the tax returns) my mom and I returned to the rehab facility where my Papa has been living. He was resting when we got there and as he woke up he told us all about how he had been working very hard in physical therapy. He told us about the walking he had done, the weights he had lifted, and how he completed every exercise that day. My mom smiled and suddenly I remembered the birthday card. Forty-four years later, he could no longer pick her up over his shoulders or dance the polka, but because of my mother’s memory and the lines drawn on his palm he had found that strength again.
This was my grandfather’s New Year’s resolution, to be able to walk again unassisted. I believe he will achieve it, and not because the doctors and nurses think so, or even because he believes it, but because of the memory of that man with the strong hands that my mother carries—the memory of my grandfather.
This is the power of memory. Our lives circle back.
And I know that not all memories are as pleasant as birthday cards and the polka. There are memories of pain, of betrayal, of moments we perhaps let others down—including ourselves or moments when we were let down. We often choose not to remember these moments—to live in regret. But we needn’t be trapped by our memories, passive victims to the fate of a movie clip.
Ian McEwan examines the power of our memories in his book Atonement, and the potency of regret.
McEwan’s main character, Briony is haunted by a false accusation she has made, sending a close friend to prison. Briony’s resolution not found in the New Year, but a resolution nonetheless, is also an act of atonement. As she writes her letter, admitting the false accusation, Briony finds the roses in December from her memory.
I believe memory can save us in the coming year. It could have saved our country from war, from the trappings of repeating the cycles we seem endlessly caught in. I worry lately about this collective cultural amnesia, not only the cycles of doomsday predictions but the deeper historical memories we are missing. We forget the stories in the lines of our palms, the generations of memories that have born witness in order to give us clarity sharper than any psychic prediction.
Buddhists speak of the cycle of samsara. It’s being trapped in our suffering, the cycle of attachment that keeps us rooted in worldly suffering. But there is also the space for enlightenment, in Buddhist teaching, a space to wake up and notice the patterns and movements we make. I believe memory could be the catalyst for our cultural awakening.
So this year, I urge you to live with the lifetime of memories behind you and a lifetime of memories ahead. Imagine the resolutions you make tomorrow evening and how they could bring roses in December.
May we each seek time in the coming days to trace the lines upon our palms. May we circle back to our best selves, bringing forth a new year.
May it be so. Amen.
