Ingathering Sunday: "A New Year"

A NEW YEAR                                                         the Rev. Daniel Budd

        Inside the Great Mystery that is,

        we don’t really own anything,

        What is this competition we feel then,

        before we go, one at a time,

                through the same gate?

        It’s a new year.

        Oh, in a few months we will celebrate a new calendar, start counting another year, a new year.

        But today is the real new year, as we gather again on a late summer morning to celebrate this community, this congregation, and the life we share together.

        Marking the beginning of a new year offers the opportunity for reflection: how might we better live our ideals?  What could we do differently?  What do we need to forgive, and where do we need to ask forgiveness?

        Marking the beginning of a new year offers the opportunity to realize that, of course, every day marks a new year, a new beginning, a time for change, for turning, for taking a new direction or staying on the old one, but in a new way.

        Sometimes, it’s not just a new year that opens before us, but an entirely new world.

        This past Tuesday afternoon, just such a new world opened for me.  My father’s death – his stepping through that gate and into the Great Mystery – moves me up the generational family ladder, as it were.  Now there is no one before me; I’m it: the sole survivor in my immediate family.  And in this new world, in this new year, I look out upon the world, and see that everything is the same and yet everything has changed.

        Some of the wisdom that has been collected about grief and grieving says that I shouldn’t even be here.  I should be taking care of myself.  Well, I thought about it, briefly, and I decided that in order to take care of myself, I needed to be here – because this is what we do, this is who we are: a community that does indeed share our joys and sorrows within one incredible circle of care and concern.

        And so I hope and pray for each of us, that as we embark upon this new year for our congregation and its community, we know that we create this congregation and its community

        by bringing ourselves to it,

        by giving ourselves to it,

        by showing up and sticking around

                and being a part of it all,

        being here,

        being with one another,

        being together.

        May we thus be blessed, and in turn, be a blessing to others.

        So may it be....