Resolutions

And with deafening crack, showers of sparks, cheers and clinking glasses, we welcome the first hour of a brand new year, striving to kick free of all the mistakes and failures of the past twelve months. Let it not be a token protestation, “I’ll do better next time,” as if with fingers crossed we secretly swore never to change.

And let us not consign our regrets to the unchanging past like millstones tied around the neck. Dead memories are dead weight and we are formed by our past no matter how hard we try to forget.

We bid farewell, but the old year will never leave us. We can only surrender our ugliest moments trusting Mercy and Wisdom to salvage beauty from the wreckage.

And though we know the will is weak, let our resolutions spring from a surer heart this year, and may the hope that flies high today still carry us, never abandon us to easy despair, and when we are about to give up, burst with the sudden brilliance of that shower of sparks in the apex of night’s parabola, and recall to us that every second--not just the one that takes us from December into January, but every second--all things are new.