New Years Eve
Reflection
As we prepare to welcome the new year we are glad to see the old year go. We know more about one another and our flaws and fragility and just how vulnerable our imagined security is. We long to return to normal; yet, that would be a mistake. The opportunity for change that our shared experience this year has offered would be lost. We are different now. The normal we knew was not healthy. We saw that in so many ways. Our attitudes, our behavior toward one another, our lack of will for the common good, our dividedness was not healthy. We can choose it again “dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us.” (A. Roy) Or we can realize that we can be in another space now and grasp the opportunity to imagine a different world and fight for it.
Prayer
May we find the wisdom and courage we need in this coming year.
Action
Accept the gift of a new year with gratitude and open your mind and heart
to respond to the new touch of God’s spirit in the days ahead.
Suggested Reading
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Jeremiah 29:11
The coronavirus pandemic has given us a chance to develop new ways of living.
Pope Francis
Celebrate endings—for they precede new beginnings.
Jonathan Huie
Do not wait until the conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes the conditions perfect.
Alan Cohen
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
Arundhati Roy
There will be no return to normality. The pandemic requires us to redesign the economy, rethink our obsession with growth, find ways to protect the most vulnerable, use apps we can trust to trace our contacts, share research and learning, and redesign everything to put people, not profits first.
Enrique Dans
It’s really a matter of life or death that after this, we don’t go back to status quo.
Frank Snowden
We will also have to ask more fundamental questions about when this crisis is over: how can we solve the ongoing climate crisis? How can we prevent social inequalities in an unforeseen economic recession? How can we prevent another pandemic?
Felix Ringel
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it
for you.
Carl Sandburg
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein
Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go. They merely determine where you start.
Nido Qubein
Packaged inside of every mistake there lays a great lesson. And while I don’t want to take the mistake into the New Year, I most certainly want to take the lesson that’s packaged inside of it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.
T.S. Eliot