Happy New Year! I'm so very glad to be here with you all this morning. The past year, my first full calendar year of ministry with you was a good one for me in many ways, and I hope that however it was overall for you, you had the gift of some bright moments to treasure in your memory during the year 2000 and beyond.

Here I am now, in this new calendar year, and here are you, with comparable experiences; we're much the same as when we last met, but there's newness in us, too. We're leading slightly new lives, all of us -- Unitarian Universalists are never set in their ways -- but I'm glad we're mostly the way we were last year and can recognize each other and enjoy our familiarity, and look forward to hearing what our friends did over Christmas and what we plan for this year. If everything had changed we wouldn't know each other; if nothing had changed, we might not want to. What happened in our lives over the course of 1999 has affected us and become part of us; it's contributed to who we are this morning.

The late UU minister Peter Fleck has written about the importance of accepting what's happened to us, our history, while at the same time refusing to be bound or defined by it. He described his own often painful efforts to make sense of his past by trying to understand all the factors in his upbringing and in his personality and in external events which led to things being the way they were, trying to understand so that he could have just a little bit more control over the way things would be from then on. Fleck says,

It is as if I have spent my life making pieces of a huge puzzle. How amazing -- and how gratifying -- that the pieces fit together and that in the still-unfinished puzzle I can discern the pattern of my life. But in trying to complete the puzzle, I find that certain pieces are missing and others seem to have no place. And it is late in the day. I have no time to create the missing pieces, no time to restructure the puzzle in order to create room for the spare pieces. The whole thing doesn't add up. At least not with the high degree of perfection which, in my book, would mean that all the pieces fit together, leaving no holes and no extras. ..... [But] lately I have come to believe that these negative experiences may well be what life is all about, that success is not the absence of failure, but the overcoming of failure. Not the absence of weakness, but the overcoming of weakness. Not the absence of mistakes, but the acceptance of the mistakes, which means the forgiving of the mistakes.

For we have the right to make mistakes; we are supposed to make mistakes. Things seem to be structured that way. We will make our peace with the past when we learn to forgive ourselves for what we have done and left undone, and then learn to live with both.

This beginning of January, 2000, is only a relatively new year for each of us, even though it has so many expectations, so much significance attached to it. It contains all the muddle of the past's mistakes as well as the freshness of the future's possibilities. Into this year we bring ourselves, our histories, our personalities, our limitations, to encounter the events and interactions which will make new and beautiful patterns of our lives. In this first service of 2000, I want to explore with you some ideas about the patterns which emerge from the passing of time or "the march of days" -- a phrase taken from that favourite hymn of mine which we've just sung. We find it relatively easy to appreciate the beauty of the changing seasons in each calendar year; I think we're often less at ease, though, with the passing of time in our individual lives. But I believe we can see the march of our own days, the passing of our own imperfectly-lived years, as a beautiful maturing process -- not just to be accepted with resignation, as we accept our appearance, warts and all, but full of beauty.

I find it exciting and fruitful to consider that what makes us vital and alive, no matter what our age or stage of life is the ability to respond to change -- to meet the challenges of change. According to several people who've studied and written about the aging process, from quite different perspectives, changes and challenges (which go together) are not just hurdles to be overcome, or roadblocks to be sidestepped, they are the essential ingredients of healthy living-- in fact, the absence of change and challenge is perhaps as good a definition as any of stagnation. The normal maturing and aging process, most experts agree, does not involve a major decline in any of our faculties. Old age, according to Betty Friedan, for one, in her book The Fountain of Age, really can be "the best of life" (for which youth, the first part of life is preparation) rather than a decline from some mythical prime. But it can only be this best, says Friedan, if it continues to present change and challenge.

We might think, on first reflection, that the passing of the years itself is enough of a challenge and a change for anyone and presents more than sufficient scope for our psychic growth and development. But we're now beginning to see that the kind of challenge which is most conducive to growth and vitality at any age is not the ongoing, gradual kind of adaptation called for by time itself, but the unexpected, uprooting kind of change which comes with a re-orientation of one's life to cope with suddenly different circumstances. Eugene Bianchi, author of a book called Aging as a Spiritual Journey, says, for example:

One characteristic reported by those who have undergone mid-life upheaval is the unexpected and almost foreign dimension of the challenge. They do not choose to enter a period of reflection or serious self-renewal. ..... the catalyst of crisis [is most often] an external event such as the loss of a job, a death in the family, a divorce, or an illness. ..... When our environment of safety and support is withdrawn, the self's equilibrium is shaken. ..... We feel emotionally at sea, drifting without a rudder or wind in the sails [thus preparing for] a change of heart, a turning around of the self, through which we can begin to understand differently what we have always seen . . .

The "march of days" is not so much a parade which we see going past us as one in which we can all be involved. Ideally, the march of days has no spectators, only participants. But participation is work; there's never an end to the adaptation, adjustment and change required to keep up with the march, to keep growing.

Betty Friedan, the pioneering U.S. feminist who had a huge influence on me and perhaps some of you in the 1960s, has more recently developed an intriguing hypothesis which suggests that it's the very fact that women tend to have more built-in changes in their lives than men do which gives them a higher life expectancy than men. The jury's out on this, of course, but I'm attracted to her theory, which seems to tie together so many pieces of the picture and which resonates with my own experiences and those of other people I've talked to. What it amounts to is this: people live longer if they have more change and challenge in their lives! Now, if this theory's right, there will undoubtedly be exceptions -- people who've led the most uneventfullives and died at 108 -- just as there are chain smokers who don't get lung cancer.

But overall, it may be true that coping with changes in your physiology, your environment, your health, your family, your work, your feelings, your life, strengthens you and increases your vitality. Perhaps, just as physical exercise helps keep our bodies in good shape and mental exercise helps keep our minds in good shape, what we might call psychic or spiritual exercise -- the exercise of our capacity for meeting life's challenges -- helps keep our beings, our spirits, our vitality in good shape. And perhaps that's one of the reasons we keep making new year's resolutions, especially if our lives are relatively stable: at some level we recognize the value of change -- even, perhaps, that bugbear of most of us when we're being rational, "change for the sake of change".

Scott Peck, most famous for his book The Road Less Travelled, discusses vitality and health in some depth in a later work, A World Waiting to be Born, . He recalls cutting his knee badly when he was a child, having to have it stitched, and having a mild inflammation set in for a while afterwards. Here are the lessons he draws from that incident:

The first is that health is a process. If a physician had examined me at any time during the three weeks between when the gash in my knee was sutured and when the last vestiges of inflammation had vanished, she would have pronounced me a perfectly healthy eight-year-old. Not in spite of the inflammation, but because of it. A reason I was perfectly healthy was precisely because the inflammatory response was proceeding well. We creatures are always being subjected to little nicks and bruises ... and besieged by hordes of alien bacteria and viruses. Some part of us is always in the process of healing. Consequently, the condition of health is not a static state of perfect wellness; it is, among other things, a condition of ongoing healing.

The point that health is not so much the absence of dis-ease as it is the presence of an optimal healing process is crucial for understanding our lives. It is crucial because the principle applies not only to our physical health but also to our mental health and to the health of our organizations and institutions. A healthy organization -- whether a marriage, a family, or a business corporation -- is not one with an absence of problems, but one that is actively and effectively addressing or healing its problems.

Perhaps you begin to see why I find this way of looking at the procession of our lives, as a particularly apt one for this first service of January, as we ponder the past twelve months with its mixture of frailties and strengths and the coming year with its inevitable challenges. We're faced again, this new year, as in every fresh year, month, day and moment of our lives, with the creative tension between newness and continuity, between planning for the future and living spontaneously in the moment, between understanding our past and present realities and being healed from them, free from bondage to them.

I believe that becoming more aware of the ever-present reality of change is one way in which we can find each moment, each day, each year, fresh and new, without ever rejecting our past or losing our openness to the future. I suggest that we can also see that reality, with its challenges to our equilibrium, its rocking of our stability, its discomforts, as the material for enhancing our personal vitality and, in our congregation, of assuring a healthy life together.

The past year, and all our history, is important to our very being, I think, at all levels --individual, family, congregation, and all the other modes in which we lead our lives. Our attempts at new beginnings at any level are doomed to failure if we ignore the past or try to put it behind us rather than learning from it and building on it. We're always working with the raw material which is handed to us, the "givens", which may not be what we would have chosen at all. My mother, who's very clothes-conscious, used to say that her idea of heaven was to be in her favourite department store "naked with a cheque book" (it would be a credit card now, I suppose). Actually, I suppose she'd have been mortified to find herself in that situation, but I think many of us can identify with her fantasy of beginning again, buying an entirely new wardrobe, from underwear to topcoat, and just throwing out the old stuff.

As it is, of course, we have to plan our purchases around what we already have, trying to make the old and new go together as best we can. Sometimes, maybe, we fantasize (as we renew our insurance policies) about the fire that will burn our house completely to the ground, allowing us to begin again with everything new. But the most amazing creativity can come from struggling with the "givens", the imperfect materials and constraints, and making something truly new and beautiful from them, like gorgeous quilts made from old clothes, like wreaths made from last year's grapevines.

We can't start completely anew. And yet there is hope for vital newness and freshness, if we can learn to hear our past and inform the future with it. We can build anew, with hard work and resolution and openness to the grace of being forgiven, of having another chance, a clean slate, or however you like to express it. We can give thanks for another chance at life whenever we celebrate a new year, a new moon, a new day or a new friendship. Today is absolutely unique and fresh, and yet it's just like all days. Unless some extraordinary experience has happened to us since yesterday, we're much the same people as we were then. What is this same old person going to do with this brand new day, this still-new year?

If we have any optimism left, we hope to re-create each day, to indulge in a little recreation, re-creation. We don't need new material, or new people, or new personalities, to make a new life. It can be done with what's at hand. As T.S. Eliot said, "Success is relative; it is what we can make of the mess we have made of things." And the best news may be that making something wonderful from our mistakes is not only a success in itself, but strengthens and fits us for increasingly fulfilling and productive lives as we grow individually and collectively more mature. The meeting of our conflicts and challenges and problems can be truly revitalizing for us. And sharing those challenges, that vitality, with each other can be an added delight.

I wish for you, for this congregation, for us, that in this new year we may all know the joy of allowing people to see us as we really are, of opening our life to others and inviting them to come in, without worrying whether everything is as it should be, knowing that we're acceptable just as we are. I wish for us all that we may have less fear of being judged, less self-consciousness and need to keep up appearances, more recognition of the truth that a healthy organism is not one that's static, but one that's healing its inescapable wounds.

A poem by Walt Whitman begins,
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long, brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

What a lovely fantasy this conjures up! The open road, leading wherever we choose; no constraints or obligations or limits! That kind of openness, an open ticket to the future, may seem out of reach -- after all, we probably aren't completely free, we may not be entirely healthy, and even light-heartedness may be a sometime thing. But our main constraint may be that we choose not to take to the open road; I believe there's a much larger element of choice in our lives than we generally recognize, and that the road is more open than we usually imagine. Perhaps we're healthy enough to walk a fair distance, whether it's on a highway, a dirt path, or the road less travelled in our minds. Perhaps we're freer than we think; we may use imaginary limitations as an excuse to retreat from freedom, because freedom can be frightening. Let's remember the next verse of Whitman's poem:

Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune.
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

Well, I'll try, anyway. And I wish for us all this year that we may see more open roads before us and be readier to travel them. May we open the year by taking steps along the beckoning way. And I end with words by Richard Gilbert, Unitarian Universalist minister in Rochester, who knows so well the value of community, from a poem called "This Place Is An Oasis":

In every desert of the spirit there is a life-giving oasis.
There stands a tree green with the colour of growth,
Brown with the colour of rootedness.
There reside beneath the surface life-giving waters . . .
Whose taste is rich with opportunity and challenge . . .
Here we take on strength for the long journey --- across the sands.

May we begin the journey again in this new year, welcoming the challenges, and filled with the strength of this life-giving oasis, our congregation of friends. So may it be. Happy New Year!