A couple of weeks ago I found a short meditation that appealed to me, written by my friend and colleague Victoria Safford. She wrote, "In a cemetery once, I found a soothing epitaph. The name of the deceased and dates had been scoured away by wind and rain, but there was a carving of a tree with roots and branches…and among them the words, 'She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things.' At first this seemed to me a little meager, a little stingy on the part of her survivors, but I wrote it down and have thought about it since, and now I can't imagine a more proud or satisfying legacy. 'She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things.'

Every day I stand in danger of being struck by lightning and having the obituary in the local paper say for all the world to see: 'She attended frantically and ineffectually to a great many unimportant, meaningless details.' How do you want your obituary to read?
'He got all the dishes washed and dried before playing with his children in the evening.'
'She balanced her checkbook with meticulous precision and never missed a day of work -- missed a lot of sunsets, missed a lot of love, missed a lot of risk, missed a lot -- but her money was in order.'
… 'He gave and forgave sparingly, without radical intention, without passion or conviction.'
How will it read, how does it read, and if you had to name a few worthy things to which you attend well and faithfully, what, I wonder, would they be?"

This story offers the best reminder I can imagine for the first Sunday of our new year together. What is it that we would name as our "few worthy things", and are we in fact attending to those things well and faithfully? Or like Victoria, are we always in danger of having our best energy sucked off to the endless busy details?

There is a little hole-in-the-wall café near the corner of Putnam and Whitney, where I sometimes stop in to pick up soup for lunch. Lots of you have seen the place or maybe stopped by yourselves. You have to be in the mood for soup in order to go there, because all they make is soup and bread. You also have to be feeling flexible, because they make only one kind of soup each day -- though sometimes they have yesterday's soup at a reduced price. The bread comes in a few different varieties, but like the soup it's basic -- nothing fancy, and no great range of choice.

The woman behind the counter always looks serene and friendly, and whenever there have been others ahead of me in line she seems to know their names. Last week when I stopped in for split pea soup, I watched as she lingered with an old man at the counter ahead of me, though he already had his soup and bread in a bag. She asked after his health, and after his wife, and commiserated with him when he told her about their illnesses. When she told him goodbye she touched his hand gently, and told him she'd look for him tomorrow. It struck me as a wonderful thing just then, to find myself in a little oasis amid the impatience and irritability and craziness of our lives, where someone makes her living by creating and then serving two of the most basic and nourishing foods I can imagine. Both soup and bread take time and attention. You have to love them, to spend that time and attention day after day.

It can't be an easy way to make a living, and it surely is no way to get rich. But there is a serenity in the woman's face, a gentleness in her voice when she invites me to make the one simple choice available there -- butter roll or rye with the soup? Something rubs off, and something more than the bag of soup and bread in my hand gets carried out the door with me. On any given day this woman is attending well and faithfully to a pot of soup, a loaf of bread, and some unknown number of persons who stand one by one at her counter and become the focus for her eyes, her voice and her touch. Watching her at work, I felt as though some small corner of the world was being patiently, lovingly stitched back together.

What are the few worthy things to which I will attend well and faithfully this year? I like that question better than the framework of a New Year resolution. Rather than resolve something or lay out a kind of business plan for the next year of my life, it seems more open and encompassing somehow to frame it as a question: what is the warm heartbeat of my life? What are the tasks to which I lift my hands willingly, with care and attention, that leave me feeling rich and satisfied when I've finished? What are the other things, the ones that claim my time but not my heart, that feed my sense of importance but not my soul, the things I should relinquish in order to make room for something worthier?

It's a good time to ask questions like these. The turning of the year is made for introspection. New Year's Day is one of the marker points, one of the road signs we pass each year, and each year the sign says more than just the year, if we take the time to read it. I imagine it sort of like the common speed limit signs we pass every few miles on any road at all, the ones that say "Speed Limit" at the top and then in huge numbers, "65" or "30" or whatever the speed is on that road. My imaginary New Year sign says "2004" in big numbers, and under it the stark words, "Speeding Up".

Everyone I know has the feeling of time speeding up as we age, born of the simple and irrefutable fact that our little stretch of life on the planet will have an endpoint, our hands a finite reach. The road signs are a chance to pay attention, to be alert as we hurtle down the figurative highway. Are we devoting ourselves to what is worthy of our devotion? Are the hours of our lives driven only by busyness? Or are we also finding some small way to stitch the fabric of our world together again, some little place among the many tattered edges where we can be of use?

In this congregation, as in many others, we use this first Sunday of the New Year as a collective ritual of remembrance and attention. On this day we look back at our lives, at the chapter we've just lived through and the changes brought to us in the course of a year. We name the large events: babies born and adopted, marriages begun, life transitions like retirement and divorce, and the great sorrow brought by the death of someone we love. We name these things together because that's one of the gifts of religious community: we form together a company of witnesses, able and willing to take notice of one another, to stand together for celebration or for grief, to offer sustenance.

Standing together, we nevertheless look back with very different eyes. For some of us it's been an exciting year; for others, maybe it's felt stagnant and boring. For some it has been a year of joy or accomplishment, of health and vigor; for others it's carried profound loss, whether of job or marriage, health or security, a spouse or parent or child or beloved friend. But whether we have come through the year bruised and aching or soaring in a high and joyful arc, we all have need to touch down into the ground of our faith.

It seems to me that at the heart of that faith is the simple conviction that how we live our lives makes a difference. It matters, whether we move along oblivious or awake, self-centered or moved by compassion, bound up with our own limited ambitions or determined to find some way, ourselves, to help with the healing of the world.