It’s A New Year

January 4, 2025 Pat Moriarty

To hear the music in today’s post, please go to the Just A Thought website. PLEASE CLICK HERE

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Sarah Puckett and Joe Nagy are contributors to this morning’s post.

Sarah with a stunning poem from Lyn Unger
Joe with his brilliant essay on Freedom

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We’re entering the new year. As with every new year, we don’t know exactly what lies ahead.

But we come into it with feelings that reflect the details of our individual lives as well as the larger world that inevitably affects us — hope, fear and trepidation, joy and anticipation, sadness, heaviness and lightness, resignation and determination.

All these things share space in our heads and hearts.

I carry this mixture of opposites within me every day, and it seeps into my dream life at night.

When I read Sarah’s poem I found it perfectly described how grace strikes:

suddenly,
quietly,
whispering…

…your life as it is, is good enough.

The Way It Is

One morning you might wake up

to realize that the knot in your stomach

had loosened itself and slipped away,

and that the pit of unfulfilled longing in your heart

had gradually, and without your really noticing,

been filled in – patched like a pothole, not quite

the same as it was, but good enough.

And in that moment it might occur to you

that your life, though not the way

you planned it, and maybe not even entirely

the way you wanted it, is nonetheless –

persistently, abundantly, miraculously –

exactly the way it is. ~ Lyn Unger

In Joe Nagy’s essay he shares what it takes to become a pothole patcher.

Freedom

When I was in my 20s my idea of freedom was, no commitments. Every promise was a bit of freedom chipped away.

When I was interviewing for my first job, with a weekly New Hampshire newspaper, I told my employer that I could not promise to stay longer than a year.

Why they even bothered to hire me, I don’t know.

It was the same with personal relationships: If I let someone get close, I feared I would somehow lose a bit of myself. I have a hard time now imagining who I was and what I was so carefully guarding in those days.

Looking back, it seems that I was protecting an empty vessel.

What I slowly came to discover was that as I let down my guard, decision by decision, promise by promise, I was constructing my soul. Each commitment

to career,
to community,
to marriage,
to parenthood

made me a better person.

In his diary of reflections, Markings, the Nobel laureate and U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld wrote:

“Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away.”

As the second U.N. secretary-general, Hammarskjöld oversaw;

the end of the Korean War,
the Suez Crisis,
the decolonization of Africa, and
the Arab-Israeli conflict.

His life was so proscribed by duty that his every word, his every gesture, was fraught with international consequences.

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union demanded that he resign. He refused.

“A task becomes a duty,” he wrote, “from the moment that you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.”

After his death, in a plane crash while he was on a peacekeeping mission in what is now Zambia, his diary was found by his bedside.

All his life he was viewed as a technocrat, and it turned out he was a spiritual mystic.

“In our era,” he wrote, “the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”

At Hammarskjöld’s death, U.S. President John F. Kennedy said:

“I realize now that in comparison to him, I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.”

What call did Dag Hammarskjöld answer? And is it calling to us?

We are so busy trying to be somebody, I wonder if we can hear what he heard? At this sacred time of year, we would be wise to pause in silence, and listen.

“I don’t know Who – or What – put the question,” wrote Hammarskjöld, “I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering but at some moment I did answer – Yes – to someone or something.

“And from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.”

~ Joe Nagy

For the new year maybe we apply a patch to our pothole by finding that someone or something to which or to whom we can say

Just a thought…

Pat and Marsha

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Now something beautiful to usher in the new year:

The Swan, from Carnival of the Animals, composed by Camille Saint-Saëns, with ballerina Svetlana Zakharova