January, 2010
Dear Friends,
UU minister, Max Coots, writes this of the turning of the year:
A year’s a year!
On calendars the seasons march in pat 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…
How do we take the measure of a year gone by? As Coots suggests above, one way is to reflect on the life within. How have I been in my soul this past year? And how am I now, as I prepare for the new year? Within the ticking of the clock of any year, many of us know profound struggles within the realities the moments present to us; and those struggles can be very, very hard to accept and to live through. Sometimes it is right to dwell on these; it’s what we need to do to get through them. Yet when those times seem long and longer, something else is right as well. It’s good to count and recount the blessings the moments bring. It too often seems we can forget the blessings when the pain of life is sharp. Coots goes on to say:
My year:
A year that is my life –
A life that is my time –
My time that ought to be eternity enough.
Wow. Eternity enough in each moment of our allotted days. If the idea seems trite in your times of struggle, think of this prayer of another UU minister, Wallace Fiske:
We thank thee for the tender things which our hearts can never fully tell in words –
For love which speech is too clumsy to express; for hopes which shine like distant stars;
For faith in the future, a faith in the goodness of life, which can look over the dark valleys
And see the light of dawn on the faraway hills.
The light of dawn comes in each season of life exactly when it should. As the seasons of our lives turn, this we can trust.
In faith,
~Olivia |
