Delivered on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025, in the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul by the Rev. Charles Wynder Jr.
Happy New Year!
When I was a teenager, just a few long years ago, I wrote New Year’s resolutions each year. And I took the exercise seriously. While I never used them as a checklist or a report card, I used them as a time to reflect on the first several months of the school year and where I wanted to be in the second half of the school year. The resolutions were not my focus as much as the process of taking the time to reflect on the past year and imagine the new year. I saw the start of the new calendar year as a chance to situate myself anew in the middle of the year that mattered most to me: the school year. It was in these years, my high school years, that I also began to understand the connection between the New Year celebration and special food.
I began to appreciate the rituals of eating in my tradition as a Southerner — a Black American Southerner from Virginia — of eating black eyed peas, collard greens, sweet potatoes and whatever protein my parents prepared. I learned to cook the foods as a teenager. As I grew into my being, I also continued the tradition of cleaning first my room, then apartment, then house by December 31. I would clean up, getting rid of the dust and dirt of the old year, fold unfolded clothes, and start the year the way I imagined I wanted. Back then I would say I was working to start the year off right. Ultimately, I continue to take time to reflect on the steps I walked the previous year and make commitments about the types of steps and the nature of path I wish to walk in the new year.
This year, even after a bit of out-of-town travel, I return to cook collard greens I froze earlier, cooked some black-eyed peas (yes, I found some black-eyed peas in New Hampshire) and baked the sweet potatoes. I did this because it symbolizes my hopes and dreams for a prosperous and good New Year.
What do you do? What does your family do? What do people in your local community do at the start of the new calendar year to mark the new beginning?
Wherever we are from and whoever we are, whatever our traditions, whatever foods we eat and rituals we engage in, the new year marks an opportunity for us to reflect on the steps we have taken over the course of the previous year and reflect on the way we want to live, study, work and “be” in the new calendar year. Our rituals of making New Year’s resolutions, eating special meals, taking runs and being with family symbolize the opportunity for renewal and fresh starts that the new calendar year represents.
Underneath this is the important belief that things change; that life is always changing. Nothing that is living, is vibrant and flourishing, is stagnant and remains the same. The rituals of the new year not only invite us to welcome new starts but also us to imagine new beginnings. The new year opens us up to new imaginings.
Our opening words and reading this morning are taken from “Meditations of the Heart” by the theologian and author Howard Thurman, where he reflects on the meaning of a new year. The commentator of this offering notes that Thurman suggests in his “Salute to the New Year” that each passing year is a “year that has fulfilled itself and passed on,” and is filled with change, fresh starts, grace and — yes — hard lessons. In the passing of the previous year, Thurman suggests, there is an “opportunity to live life more wisely,” noting that both the past and the future are “Golden Ages.”
Thurman starts by asking us to imagine there are no days, only nights. He asks us to imagine that there is only winter, or only summer or only spring. He goes on to ask us to imagine that there were no artificial things or instruments to help us to be “mindful of the passing of time… .no years, just the passing of hours with no signposts to mark” the hours into units of months and years.” If this was the case, Thurman asserts, there would be no New Year.
He also asks in the meditation to imagine that there were no tomorrows, for without a tomorrow there is no future. He says that without a sense of the future, we would not be able to interpret our present or our past. It is the place of tomorrow, Thurman writes, that one can bring to bear upon the next day all that they have learned and gathered or accumulated from the other days of the past. Allow us to select the things from the past and build on them in the future. As Thurman teaches us and taught scores of others, “If there is no future, then the present and the past have no meaning — so all the religions of the world have something important and crucial to say about the future.”
I find this attractive. It draws me as we come back to St. Paul’s School having traveled the paths to close a Fall Term. We journeyed three weeks into the Winter Term before having a time away at home and other places with loved ones and friends. Now, at the beginning of a new year, we can make meaning by reflecting on yesterday, learning from it and growing. As Thurman says, the meaning of our lives is not based on what we have experienced or now experiencing; rather, “the meaning of our lives can be identified by what is yet to come.” Perhaps that is why Tony Bennett used to sing, “The best is yet to come … and won’t it be fine.”
We have had a chance to reflect on our hours, days, weeks and term from last year (earlier this school year) and now we can move into our tomorrows at St. Paul’s School. The tomorrows that not only allow us to make meaning of our present and our past, but — and — the tomorrows that invite us to imagine new possibilities. Tomorrows that allow us to improve on our past by forgiving ourselves, forgiving others; by releasing habits that failed us and starting new ones. Granting ourselves and others the grace of starting anew. Pause for a moment. I invite you now to reflect for a moment on the tomorrows you imagine in this new year. As we depart from this holy time together, our first period of communion together since our return to these hallowed grounds, please reflect on these closing words from Thurman that were so beautifully read by Ms. Caroline Blosser:
“[A]s we move into the New Year, let us move into it face forward, greeting the future with hope and aspiration. Let us not back into the future, saying to ourselves that whatever the future maybe, cannot, in any sense, be as good as the past. No. The Golden Age is not in the past, was not yesterday. The Golden Age is tomorrow. Let us salute, then, the New Year.”
Happy New Year!
May it be so, Amen.