How many of you still make New Year’s resolutions? You know those promises we make to ourselves as we stand on the threshold of a new calendar year? Where we mark time by resolving to make ourselves over into a new image.

How many of you kept the promises you made last year? New Year’s resolutions are so seldom kept that they have become clichés, something funny, a kind of game we play with ourselves. As I saw in a television ad: To the strands of auld lang syne, surrounded by party hats and empty champagne glasses, lofty promises are made in the exuberance of the moment. This year I will take the steps to my office every day, this year I will walk a mile, this year I will loose weight, learn Spanish, learn to play the flute, be a good hostess or host, organize my files, finish my sermon by Thursday and be happily unruffled all the time. Each promise in the ad is followed by derisive laughter presumably from the other partygoers. Sure you will! We all know better, don’t we! And yet some of us go through this ritual, if not at New Years then at other times of the year saying to ourselves this year, this month, this week, I will change my ways. This time I will do better. So what is it all about? Why do we have such a hard time keeping those promises we make supposedly to ourselves and for our own sake? Is it perhaps because we really do not want to and choose easy gratification over long term gain? Or is it because we promise the wrong things and do not look deeply enough at what it may be our body and soul really need and want at this time?

Do those resolutions really spring from a feeling that we do not measure up to some standard of impossible perfection? What would happen if we looked instead at what might be right w ith us? What would happen in our lives if we instead treated the whole web of life on this earth and our own selves with an attitude of what some Buddhists call a loving kindness? Would we then keep our resolutions? And would they be the same ones as before?

My guess is they would be very different resolutions.

My guess is we would be happier and have more energy to do good in this world if we weren’t so busy improving ourselves. The Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Fulghum writes in his book From Beginning to End, The Rituals of our Lives: My friend Alice seems to have arrived at the threshold of living one day at a time. It’s calming to be in her unhurried gentle presence. She used to be as manic and driven as anyone I knew. But not now. Something’s different. She says it has to do with the way she begins her day: her morning ritual…

One spring the women in Alice’s group were passing around self improvement books. About dieting, exercise and spirituality. But as she looked at all of these the thought came to her that creating a " you could do better" atmosphere was as often a curse as an encouragement…. Though she was not as thin, attractive, smart healthy or happy as she might have been she found that life, to her surprise, was fine especially when she considered it one day at a time and one morning at a time. What Fulghum writes about is really a kind of grace. What Alice had was acceptance. That is what her morning ritual was all about. She began each day slowly, unhurriedly, paying attention to the dawn and allowing her soul to awaken as well. She did not turn on the lights or the television but enjoyed the growing daylight as it came through the windows. In winter she lit candles and sat watching them glow. Being was enough for now just being. Such rituals are one way in which we payattention to the stages and ages of our life. Rituals create sacred time. Sacred time is when we become aware that the moment we live in here and now is also the dwelling place of the eternal. Haste and ambition are the adversaries of sacred time.

Time is a gift. If there is one single learning to be taken away from this year 2001 it is the preciousness of life and the time we have been given on this earth. So brutally was this fragility of life brought home to us that it seems now as if the year was cut into two parts: before and after September 11. But the truth is that not one of us ever know just how long we have on this earth we just don’t pay much attention to this uncomfortable fact every day. So maybe the question to ask is what will we do with the gift of time? When you hear yourself saying I do not have time, stop! What is it you would like time for? What must you change to make that possible? There is an old proverb that says: The most difficult mountain to cross is the threshold. Which is another way of saying that the hardest part is taking that first step toward real change.

But if you think about it life is nothing but moments of crossing over. We move from one stage of life to the next or from year to year in the calendar. In between we mark the time, mark the thresholds of our lives, we celebrate and we mourn. And when we have crossed over enough doorsteps we have won the right to stitch all these moments together into the comforting quilt of wisdom. The problem with youth as Soren Kierkegaard wrote is that Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.

Between the first inhale at birth and the last exhale of death are all the little deaths and revivals. Some part of us is always dying. The nature of change as with beginnings is such that there is always a loss too even when the event is seen as wholly positive. Take a happy event, weddings and services of union for example. Yes, it is a wonderful event, two people declaring their love for each other and friends and family gathered to witness and celebrate. But there is a loss too. Remember the scene in the musical Fiddler on the Roof where the parents wonder at how quickly time has passed. " Is that the little girl I carried, is that the little boy I saw? " they ask each other, adding: " I don't remember growing older " It is important to recognize that even happy occasions hold some element of loss. If we should for example decide here in this congregation to expand our space and move to or build a bigger place that would be a good thing. Butthere will also inevitably be some loss in such a decision. This particular place holds many fond memories of special events, memorial services, great dinners, music and our children have grown up here. Yes, we will grow new memories and take the old ones with us but as I said there is a loss even in good things. That change trust upon us by fate is disturbing is easy to understand. But when something good happen, when indeed we make something good happen, why are we so often stressed out by that too?

In his book A Faith for All Seasons William R. Murry, a Unitarian Universalist Minister writes:

We experience other losses more frequently than death but since we most often associate grief with death we don't usually think of other losses as a source of grief. But they are.

and his list goes on and on. The point is that any loss can trigger the emotions we know as grief. When we experience losses we tend to go through a particular process and the more acute the loss the more deeply we experience each phase. What is important is knowing this so that we can recognize it in ourselves and be better prepared for it, the unexpected emotional reaction, that sudden sadness, the general listlessness and lack of energy, all can be simply our way of grieving our losses. Then we can understand what is going on, then we can be gentle with our selves through this process, then we can seek whatever support we may need to get safely through it.

This may be why we seldom succeed in our resolutions. Because we do not often acknowledge what we would have to give up to attain that which we say we want.

To do this we have to take stock of where we are in our lives. Not in the sense of trying to live up to some image such as being thinner, richer, prettier, more clever or any other idolatry of perfectionism. But to take the time to listen carefully to what is that really matters to us. What do we really believe?

As a minister I deal with the reality of death often, up close and in a personal way. It does as they say concentrate the mind wonderfully. Rev. Robert Fulghum has by his own account done over 100 memorial services. There is an unusual photograph in his book where he is sitting in a lawn chair, meditating in a cemetery. The caption tells us that he is in fact sitting on what will one day become his grave. Morbid, you might say. But he would dispute that. He is not sitting on his own grave because his death is imminent - he is in pretty good shape. What he is doing is confronting finitude - the limits of life and the inevitability of his own death much as did monks in the middle ages. The real question is what shall he do with his life between now and then?

He writes: Visiting my own grave has become a personal ritual for me, a sacred habit. Recently I noticed the names on the nearest graves: Grimm and Pleasant. Being buried between grimm and pleasant has a poetic rightness to it. Visiting my grave has the reliable capacity to untwist the snarls in my mind and soul, especially when I get angry about small things or loose track of what is important. One visit I realized that were I to die that day and my wife were to put an honest epitaph on my headstone, it would say: Here lies a jackass-too pissed off to live long. How I’d hate to die mad…He continues: The light I see from my grave started toward me before I came into being. The source of the light may have died out by now. That’s a scientific fact. My light gives off another kind of light as it consumes its energy. That light too might shine long after the source is gone. That is a statement of poetry and intention. Light is both constant and relative.

This reading struck a chord with me. Is that not what we have been doing since September? Standing on the edge of the abyss and wondering at the smallness of so many of our worries? Ask yourself these questions: What kind of light might our lives give to others after we are gone? What will people remember about us? In Gaining control Robert F. Bennett writes: In America today we equate a persons’ worth with what she or he is doing or by how much money they make.

Is that still true, I wonder, or have we as a nation been shaken at least for a little while into realizing what really matters? Old fashioned ordinary and extraordinary virtues like goodness, courage, love, family, friends, children and faith if not in God, then at least in something greater than our selves. What meaning do you find in your life? What do you live for? What might you die for? Suddenly we have all these hard but real questions at this year’s end. Things like losing weight while it may be important for your health does not quite cut to the same core. War and peace, fear and the world’s turmoil are too much with us now. Tell me what brings you peace? Where do you find your joy?

This is my resolution: to stick with those real questions and not get lost in or stuck in trying to be or do things perfectly. In their book called The Perfectionist Predicament Susan Metlsner and Miriam Elliott talk about performance perfectionists who always find one more mountain to climb. Fun, family, friends, recreation, travel are relegated to a category labeled: things I will get around to someday.

What might we do instead? Perhaps we should juggle more scarves! Yes, you heard me correctly: Juggle more scarves! You say you have never done that? Well I hadn’t either but I do remember one year in Houston when I attended a Mid Size church conference and a roomful of 200 Unitarian Universalists were each given three chiffon scarves and asked to juggle them. There is an art to it I discovered, a certain flinging upwards of the wrist and allowing them to float and it only works if you relax and have fun with it! Perfectionism does not do it when juggling scarves. However the sight of a roomful of serious people, ministers and church leaders all trying to keep hot pink, bright yellow and orange scarves afloat was a truly funny and humbling sight.

Do you want healing and wholeness this next year? Who doesn’t? Open the windows of your soul wide! Know that our life’s tapestry is woven fine of all that we have experienced, joys, sorrows, pain and pleasure intertwined with strands of the silly and sublime. Take this New Year as a gift. Take time as a gift. Allow the grace of the moment to enter your soul. Call it the grace of God or call it the grace of the Universe, but know that it is there at the core of your soul. The courage of the human spirit will bubble up as strong and persistent as a mountain stream up and out among the rocks.

There is much healing to be done, but it must begin wi th us. That is my New Year’s resolution.