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Christmas Poem

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Wilde Wanderings
By Rev. Sydney Wilde

It is a week before Christmas, and as I sit down to write this article I’m not ready for the New Year. I’m not ready to let go of the old or to explore the new. All I want to do is get through this week! If I were a Buddhist I might claim to be living totally in the present, but that would be an illusion (and a lie); I’m living in stress and a state of acute writer’s block!

Hopefully as you read this column the holiday strains will have passed, and we will all be moving into a new year with a greater sense of calm (or perhaps relief). My hope for the new year is for an openness to new beginnings, a willingness to accept change, and a growing enthusiasm for new adventure.

In the meantime, I turn to a colleague, Kathleen McTigue, for help with the writer’s block. This reading appears in the back of our hymnal and expresses for me the essence of every new beginning. It also expresses my hope for our continuing work together as we plant the seeds of change that will carry First Church into a new cycle life.

                 Sydney

New Year's Day

The first of January is another day dawning, the sun rising as the sun always rises, the earth moving in its rhythms,

With or without our calendars to name a certain day as the day of new beginning, separating the old from the new.

So it is: everything is the same, bound into its history as we ourselves are bound.

Yet also we stand at a threshold, the new year something truly new, still unformed, leaving a stunning power in our hands:

What shall we do with this great gift of Time, this year?

Let us begin by remembering that whatever justice, whatever peace and wholeness might bloom in our world this year,

We are the hearts and minds, the hands and feet, the embodiment of all the best visions of our people.

The new year can be new ground for the seeds of our dreams.

Let us take the step forward together, Onto new ground,

Planting our dreams well, faithfully, and in joy.