AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 4th, 2004


It was the night AFTER Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, EXCEPT for...have you figured it out? I first became suspicious when I noticed that Parker’s kibble seemed to be disappearing...but I couldn’t remember seeing her eat it. Then came the tell-tale droppings, and then finally, one morning, I came downstairs to the kitchen a little earlier than usual and caught sight of a little gray tail scurrying beneath the oven, and I knew that I had uninvited company.

Poison, of course, was out of the question. Poison is an indiscriminate Weapon of Mass Destruction; I wouldn’t want Parker to get into it by mistake, and besides, if I’m going to kill something, I want to see the body. A cat would probably be the best solution, at least over the long haul. Cats are not only efficient hunters, but their mere presence also represents a significant deterrent to future insurrections. Cats and mice have an instinctive understanding of one another -- cats are natural born predators, and mice seem to know this and try to stay out of their way. I even envisioned the mercenary surrogate I would acquire: a lean, stealthy, and appropriately bloodthirsty tiger-striped kitten whom I would name “Halliburton” (since names like “Bushie” or “Rummy” or even “Wolfie” just seemed a little too warm and fuzzy for the aggressive killing machine I had in mind). Unfortunately though, cats and dogs also sometimes have an instinctive mis-understanding of one another, and I wasn’t that certain about how well my current critter would respond to an interloper in her territory (although she hasn’t really seemed to mind the mice much). So for the time being, at least, I am left to rely upon the more traditional tactics of counter-insurgency: resource denial, superior intelligence, and the occasional well-placed and attractively-baited booby-trap, or “mechanical ambush” as they now sometimes more properly identified.

So as I shopped last week for a “better mousetrap,” I realized that it has been nearly two decades since I last confronted a situation like this. And I was a little surprised to discover that the price of the technology hasn’t changed a penny in all that time: two for 99 cents, wherever better mousetraps are sold. Back in those days, I was a young, newly-married minister living in Midland Texas, with an nine-year-old step-daughter who loved animals...especially small cute gray furry animals...and a twelve-year-old step-son who loved to torment his sister. And after I trapped the first mouse, Stephenie was so upset (and Jacob so obnoxious) that I became remorseful, and vowed I would never again take the life of another living creature (or at least not any small cute gray furry ones)....and then I made the mistake of writing about my experience in the church newsletter, which resulted in all sorts of unsolicited advice, and even letters from all over the country, some containing plans for humane “live” traps...some of which actually worked.... Except that the mice kept coming back, and inviting their friends....and that was when Margie went out and got a cat, and we never saw another living mouse again (or at least not any that lived for long).

But now I’m wondering, what ever happened to that somewhat naive, somewhat idealistic, sensitive and compassionate young father of young children, to turn him now into such a relentless, calculating, cold-blooded killer, someone who is perfectly capable of the premeditated extermination of unwanted vermin from his home with hardly a second thought or even a moment’s lost sleep. Did I just grow up? Or did I lose track of something important along the way? Or maybe it’s a little of both?

The start of a New Year is traditionally a time for reassessing the past, as well as charting a new path to a better future. We reflect upon where we’ve been and resolve to do better, to BE better, than before. People resolve to quit smoking, to lose weight, maybe to pay off their credit cards and start saving more money...they join health clubs in great numbers, and for a month or so they may actually even go. And, of course, it’s a cultural cliché that nothing ever really changes; and yet, when we look around, we see that over time, people and things DO in fact change. Maybe not all at once, and maybe not exactly the way we’d planned, but change does indeed happen, whether we want it to or not. So the issue is not really whether or not things will ever change; the issue is how aware will be be of those changes AS they happen, and how much control will we exert over them? Awareness and Control: our sense of the latter is often extremely exaggerated, since it’s such a comforting fantasy to believe that we have effective control over what happens to us; but it is actually only through the former -- through our ability to perceive accurately and understand what is happening all around us, that we truly gain any meaningful direction over our lives at all.

In any event, I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the kind of resolutions I want to make for this next year, and also reflecting upon the year just past -- which was really quite an eventful year for me: a new job in a new community, the end of an eighteen-year marriage, and two moves when you stop to think about it: a relatively short one from Nantucket to the mainland, and the other much more significant cross-country move from my old home in the Pacific Northwest here to New England. And between my learning how to let go graciously of the old, and anxiously trying to figure out all of the nuances of the new, not to mention my frequent obsession with what I saw happening around me politically in the world, I sometimes felt like I’d let myself get wound up a little more tightly than I was accustomed to beneath my otherwise ordinarily calm, collected, and perfectly controlled exterior. And I also found myself reminded of something that Winston Churchill once said, that “a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind, and won’t change the subject,” and wondering how far down that path I’d wandered myself, and what in the world I was going to do about it.

I didn’t really come to any resolution on that one -- like many of you, it’s probably going to be something that I continue to wrestle with throughout 2004....and the closer we get to the election, the more difficult it is going to be for everyone in the country. But I can at least still change the subject, at least for the time being, and talk about something a lot more pleasant. This past Christmas Season really turned out to be quite delightful for me, despite the fact that I hadn’t really planned on celebrating Christmas much this year. I think it all started the weekend of the Greens Sale and the big blizzard...all that snow (which, being from Oregon, I had dreaded) actually turned out to be quite beautiful, and we had surprisingly good turnouts at all the events, especially the Sunday evening winter holidays concert, which I thought was absolutely magnificent. Likewise, the Pageant (which I had heard so much about) was even more fun than I had imagined, while the anxiety I’d been feeling about conducting three different Christmas Eve services for the first time quickly disappeared when the time at last arrived, and as the evening progressed each service seemed to build upon the others, while developing its own special personality, each one special yet slightly different. Even Margie McCormick’s memorial service last weekend, which one might ordinarily tend to think of as a sad occasion, had such a warm feeling to it, as people who knew and cared about her came together one more time simply to be with one another, and to share their memories of her remarkable life. And as I shared these moments with all of you, I felt so privileged to have been invited to become a part of all your lives, and thus that much more at home here in this new community.

And now it’s the start of yet another New Year, and time to look forward to a future that for the moment exists only in imagination. For years I used to celebrate the beginning of a New Year by stopping off at the post office and mailing in my sometimes as many as a dozen entries to the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. One of the dubious advantages of living in a household with three different last names, and reading a lot of magazines, is that we tended to get a lot of junk mail, although I'm still not certain why I ever actually bothered to send them all in, since no one I know personally has ever won anything from one of these contests. I guess it just seemed worth an hour or so of licking and pasting, and a few dollars in postage, to have the legitimate prerogative of daydreaming about what I would do with all that money if I actually won it. I know a lot of people who consider this sort of daydreaming a values clarification exercise, something along the lines of “where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” Personally though, I’ve often felt that the daydreaming itself is probably just as valuable as the actual money would be. If I actually had that much money, I would probably spend a lot of my time worrying about how to hold on to it, or even worrying about whether or not I could actually trust the people I’d hired to hold on to it for me. Money solves a lot of problems, but it also brings problems of its own. In many ways, I’ve already won the most important lottery of all -- I’m alive, and in relatively good health, and free to dream to my heart’s content about anything I please, and then to pursue those dreams that seem most “worthy” to me, and through my own efforts, make them real.

There's something about the coming of a New Year that lends itself naturally to daydreaming, to the intentional cultivation of a spirit of hope and optimism, a sense of possibility and new beginning. It's difficult to ignore it even if we try. As I hinted a little earlier, I once read that the three most common resolutions this time of year are to quit smoking, to lose weight, and to "get in shape" (whatever that means) -- but let me tell you, as someone who smoked two packs a day from the age of seventeen to the age of thirty-three, and then gained fifty pounds when I finally resolved to give them up in earnest, I’ve pretty much concluded that it’s probably best to follow the path of “all things in moderation, nothing to excess,” and to try to be content with whatever shape I am. The truly tough part was realizing that, no matter how much I work out, or how closely I watch what I eat, I'm never going to be seventeen again, or even thirty-three; that the fantasies of youth are unavoidably tempered by the realities of maturity, and that I will never, say, throw a long pass for the winning touchdown in the fourth quarter of the Rose Bowl, nor even daydream about it with the same intensity that I did when I was younger. With each New Year a little bit more of my life is behind me; with each new beginning, we mark an end to another dream that will never be.

Knowing this, I think it's important that we learn to choose our resolutions with care. Quitting smoking and losing weight are great, for as far as they go, but what kind of "shape" do you really want to be in a year from now? What WOULD you do if you won ten million dollars, and what's keeping you from having the best part of that now, if you choose? This is what I learned from my years of daydreaming about winning the lottery: that the really important things in my life have nothing to do with money itself, but rather with the illusion of freedom which money seems to buy, the ability to stop worrying about the trivial and the mundane, and to concentrate on the truly significant.

But the wisdom to concentrate on what is truly significant is not really something that you can purchase with cash. It's the product of a willingness to search your own soul, and the courage to pursue what you find there. And it's also an ability to recognize your responsibilities and confront your limitations, to affirm your commitments and the values on which they are based, to balance the demands of the present with the possibilities of the future, and to walk that narrow path from wishful thinking to knowing contentment. When you finally take the time to figure out what really matters, to move beyond dreams of eternal youth and a thirty-two inch waistline, or cars and clothes and boats and travel, and recognize your more essential hunger for a spiritual freedom which material things so often only pretend to satisfy, you discover that it takes more than a nice house to make a real home, and that the true measure of wealth lies not in what you have acquired, but in your capacity to share generously with others.

I also want you to know that it gives me no real joy to be winning my war against the mice. I’d gladly negotiate with them, if I could only figure out a way to understand them, and to make them understand me. I’d be happy to feed them, and give them shelter from the elements, even protect them from cats, if they would just mind their own business, and stay out of my stuff, and occasionally clean up after themselves. But I also know that’s not going to happen, and unless I do something about it, the problem is only going to get worse. But it gives me no pleasure to take their lives, nor do I feel especially superior to them because I can trick them into sticking their heads into a fatal trap with just a little daub of strategically-placed peanut butter. I do it because I have to, and that makes me a grown-up. But I wish it were otherwise every time I put one of their warm, furry, broken little bodies into an old plastic bag and throw it in the trash. And while it might seem a lot easier just to pay someone to do all this for me, at the end of the day I don’t think it would make me any better a person. If I’m going to kill something, I want to see the body.

Our lives can often seem like a series of compromises between the material demands of physical survival and frustrated aspirations of a more intangible nature, which we often but dimly understand. We look at our lives, we feel that something is missing, we hunger for something more, and then we try to fill that empty space as best we can, sometimes with money and the things money can buy, and sometimes with things far more valuable. But however you may resolve this year to change your lives for the better, I hope that some of you, at least, as you're evaluating your priorities for the next twelve months, will chose to bump up your participation in the life and activities of this church just a few notches higher on the scale. It doesn’t have to be a lot -- just find some new, small thing that captures your interest, and then maybe invite a friend along to share the experience with you. I can attest from personal experience that it really is a lot easier than either quitting smoking or losing weight. And it really can help you get in shape for whatever it is you dream of doing in the years ahead. Within this community of memory and hope, we strive together to create from our dreams a sacred space of wisdom and renewal. Resolve, this year, to take a little more time to more fully become a part of it, so that it, in turn, may more fully become a part of you.

ANN LANDERS’ PERPETUAL NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

Let this coming year be better than all the others. Vow to do some of the things you’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t find the time.

Call up a forgotten friend. Drop an old grudge, and replace it with some pleasant memories. Share a funny story with someone whose spirits are dragging. A good laugh can be very good medicine.

Vow not to make a promise you don’t think you can keep. Pay a debt. Give a soft answer. Free yourself of envy and malice. Encourage some youth to do his or her best. Share your experience, and offer support. Young people need role models.

Make a genuine effort to stay in closer touch with family and good friends. Resolve to stop magnifying small problems and shooting from the lip. Words that you have to eat can be hard to digest.

Find the time to be kind and thoughtful. All of us have the same allotment” 24 hours a day. Give a compliment. It might give someone a badly needed lift.

Think things through. Forgive an injustice. Listen more. Be kind.

Apologize when you realize you are wrong. An apology never diminishes a person. It elevates him. Don’t blow your own horn. If you’ve done something praiseworthy, someone will notice eventually.

Try to understand a point of view that is different from your own. Few things are 100 per cent one way or another. Examine the demands you make on others.

Lighten up. When you feel like blowing your top, ask yourself “Will it matter a week from today?” Laugh the loudest when the joke is one you.

The sure way to have a friend is to be one. We are all connected by our humanity, and we need each other. Avoid malcontents and pessimists. They drag you down and contribute nothing.

Don’t discourage a beginner from trying something risky. Nothing ventured means nothing gained. Be optimistic. The can-do spirit is the fuel that makes things go.

Read something uplifting. Deep-six the trash. You won’t eat garbage -- why put it into your head? Don’t abandon your old-fashioned principles. They never go out of style. When courage is needed, ask yourself, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”

Walk tall, and smile more. You’ll look 10 years younger. Don’t be afraid to say, “I love you.” Say it again. They are the sweetest words in the world.

Recipe for a Prosperous, Peaceful Year-Round Year!

Take twelve, fine, full-grown months,
see that these are thoroughly free
from all old memories of bitterness,
rancor, hate and jealousy;
cleanse them completely from
every clinging spite:
pick off all specks of pettiness and littleness;
in short , see that these months are freed from all the past;
have them as fresh and clean
as when they first came from the great storehouse of Time.

Cut these months into thirty or thirty-one equal parts.
This batch will keep for just one year.
Do not attempt to make up the whole batch at one time
(so many persons spoil the entire lot in this way),
but prepare one day at a time, as follows:

Into each day put twelve parts of faith,
eleven of patience,
ten of courage,
nine of of work (some people omit this ingredient and so spoil the flavor of the rest),
eight of hope,
seven of fidelity,
six of liberality,
five of kindness,
four of rest (leaving this out is like leaving the oil out of the salad, don't do it),
three of prayer,
two of meditation,
and one well selected resolution.

If you have no conscientious scruples,
put in about a teaspoonful of good spirits,
a dash of fun, a pinch of folly,
a sprinkling of play, and a heaping cupful of good humor.

Pour into the whole love ad libitum and mix with a vim.
Cook thoroughly in a fervent heat;
garnish with a few smiles and a sprig of joy;
then serve with quietness, unselfishness, and cheerfulness,
and a Happy New Year is certain.