A week ago my mother sent on to me a New Year's greeting written by Tim Girvin, the oldest son of my parents close friends. Tim and I grew up in Spokane at the same time but inhabited the parallel universes created by a few years difference in our ages, so I haven't ever really known him. He makes his living in an unusual branch of the arts: he's a calligrapher -- someone who studies and expands on the artistry in the formation of letters and words. And I tell you this because it seems to me that only a calligrapher could come up with this particular take on our emergence into a new year. Tim wrote:

"There is a device, several hundred years old, a grammatical gesture called the apostrophe; it's symbolic of the passing of the year, in its stroke. Strophe, the second part of the word, comes from the Greek, meaning: to turn (strephein). It is…a curled, drawn typographical rendering that turns back on itself: it spins, a miniature galaxy, a small black constellation. And for us, this is an appropriate tiny rendering of the year, and its passage, from one turning to the next. For in this, we are spinning around the sun, taking another voyage, to travel once more,… to experience the new and undiscovered; and to turn away from the past evolution, to open something untouched. So with this tiny gesture, symbolizing this moment, let's take [the] turning... and make our way into the new year -- to something marvelous and miraculous -- to turn away from the past year, into the next: which shall be something fresh, intriguing and fascinating."

Now, I realize that this could be seen as an excessively optimistic view of the new year. That the coming year will be something 'fresh, intriguing and fascinating' might be argued, at least by some of us. It might be dismissed by those still aching with some loss, a loss that doesn't diminish simply because the calendar turned its page. It might be resisted by those smack in the middle of fighting a critical illness, whether in themselves or in someone they love, since the treatments in January are exactly the same as the ones that came in December. And the optimism could be shadowed, for any of us at all, if we tune in carefully to the news of the world as it unfolds raw and painful, clearly turning over no new leaf as we enter our new year.

But Tim's words are not spoken by a Pollyanna, actually, and knowing something of their context makes me take another look and hold my cynicism at bay. In the year just closed, in the middle of January, Tim's youngest brother Matthew died in a helicopter crash as he was hard at work with the U.N., laboring in Mongolia to feed some of the thousands who face starvation. So there is a peculiar and powerful resonance to Tim's vision of change and the passage of time as an apostrophe, a curving pause that tells us something about the pauses, the changes, the turnings of our lives. At its heart are the hard lessons born of a searing loss; and yet even there, even right there at the most difficult core of our fragile lives, comes the murmur of a song. What is that about?

Poet M.S. Burrows wrote:

...We taste each holy fragment of this world
through clumsy instruments of speech, and
reach by the wisdom of our flesh a hurled

echo of descending grace. We cannot measure
what lies within this darkness that glistens
at the brittle edges of fear and pleasure;

to taste it we must listen with patient
and singular hearts...The birds offer no reason
why they greet each rising dawn with song,
nor do we require an argument in any season
to wrap ourselves in the wonder of the day...

The meaning of a new year doesn't lie in the illusion that we've got the chance to make new everything that lies around us. Its meaning lies only in the power of attention that it might evoke in us: our willingness to choose how we will greet and respond to the changes, the turning points that come our way. The new year can itself be a turning point, of course. There is some genuine power, for some people, in the making of resolutions. This might truly be the year that you find the inner discipline you have so long sought, or the year in which you mend the long-troubled relationship, or the year in which you finally make a break from the job that has slowly been killing you. This might truly be the time that will prove, in the clear vision of hindsight, to have been a life turning point for you, a place you recognize in retrospect as a crossroads.

The trick about those turning points and crossroads in our lives, though, is to see how little they depend on what is thrust upon us, how much they depend on what we choose. Every single day of our lives delivers its share of grace and sorrow, and both the gifts and the curses can be seen as visitations out of our control, raining down on us for better or for worse. But the real turning points in our lives, those inner shiftings that shape the deep selfhood of each of us -- those have more to do with how we greet the grace or the sorrow. How will we choose to understand what befalls us? What will we choose to make of it?

It's easiest to ask that question at the dramatic moments, the earth-shaking changes that come our way. The long-time lover who has now left; the new and gloriously perfect job that seemed to simply land in our lap; the sudden onset of illness; the epiphany that shifted us toward a truer calling for our lives. But it's also possible to think of these large turning points simply as chapter headings, chapter titles that herald a new page or a new shape to the narrative. They are meaningless without the story that will follow, built up sentence by sentence as we move through the ordinary days of our lives.

Because the dance of change is the only constant we have, the truth is that every step along the way is a turning point. When the world around us, events around us, people around us change --as they must -- we are invited to respond, to choose our response as conscious participants, not passive observers. And to at least some degree, the response we choose helps to shape what will happen next: we participate in forming the next moment by how we greet the present one.

So the turning point of a new year can be a chance to assess where we are and make some changes. It is a chance to recognize that our time is finite, that we are limited creatures who are ultimately and always limited by our own deaths. And it is also a chance to remember the enormous power of change and transformation that we can sometimes find in even the smallest details of our lives. Long ago, UU minister Clark Wells wrote this reflection on large changes contained in small things: "I believe in new beginnings, at new year's or any time. I believe in them because I've had them. During my first year in theological school I was in despair about life, my own included. One cold, dreary Chicago day during the worst of it, wandering aimlessly along 63rd Street, going silently crazy, I suddenly, without intending or willing it, turned and stepped into a fresh fruit bar and ordered a glass of orange juice.

I drank it unthinkingly, then tasted the juice, the pulp. And slowly something happened. The orangeness of that orange juice, its sweetness and sunfilled-ness, the feel of it going into my throat and into my body, awakened me. I remember mumbling to myself how those oranges were doing good by me, actually caring for me without my asking, and the least I could do was say -- if not "thank you" -- at least "okay".

Maybe if oranges could be such a pal -- zinging good things through me -- why not other things? The sun, the air, the sidewalk, the music pouring from the bells of Rockefeller Chapel across the midway. I finished my orange juice, walked back to the Meadville Library, wrote an A paper on Luther and the Anabaptists and went on into the ministry.

So I believe in turn-arounds, the chances we get to begin ourselves anew. Of course I believe in effort, doing all I can to provide the conditions to make positive things happen. But I also have faith that when positive things don't happen and when my best efforts seem useless, that down the street somewhere, around a corner, the gift awaits, like the grace of God in the peeling of a fruit, when I listened to the orange."

At its best, the habit of greeting a new year with resolutions has to do with this kind of faith: faith not only in ourselves and our ability to change what needs changing, but faith as well that we're not going it alone: there are other dancers on the stage, other powers at work around us, even in something as apparently mundane as a glass of orange juice.

The ritual of marking the new year -- whether individually in our own hearts and minds or collectively as we do today -- is a way of asking the vital questions as deeply as we can. What do we need to let go of in our lives? What do we need to turn our hearts toward and embrace? At its best, this religious community serves us in searching for these answers by acting as our community of memory and of hope. As the new year dawns we touch the community of memory and remind one another of the individual chapters of history that have been created in the year just past. As the new year dawns we touch the community of hope, and look together at the potential contained in each of us, and in the new chapter of time opening before us.

Today we honor some of the transitions in our lives that we recognize as being among the most important; and yet even as we light our candles in their honor, we try to remember that these things are just the chapter headings. The sentences of every day give the continuity that carries the story of our lives, reminding us that every choice and movement we make is worthy of the same kind of attention, the same kind of consciousness. Every step we take has the potential for being a turning point, after all; and something as simple as a glass of orange juice might, in the right moment, offer us the power of an oracle.

In "Song of Myself" Walt Whitman wrote,

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.