After all the familiar rituals of last night, a New Year’s morning benediction for you:
May this first day of 2024 give you time for reflection, a sense of gratitude for arriving at this moment, and a renewal of courage to face what lies ahead.
Always a night from old to new!
Night and the healing balm of sleep!
Each morn is New Year’s morn come true,
Morn of a festival to keep.
All nights are sacred nights to make
Confession and resolve and prayer;
All days are sacred days to wake
New gladness in the sunny air.
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.
Helen Hunt Jackson, “New Year’s Morning” (1892)
2023 was a remarkable year at The Cottage with the breadth of issues covered, the depth of theological insight, great guests, thoughtful interviews, and the growth and enthusiasm of this global community of readers from 153 countries.
THANK YOU for believing in this work, my writing, and sharing it with your friends.
In 2024, the Cottage will keep you informed about the theological and leadership challenges of Christian nationalism, the religious angle in breaking political and cultural news, and the specific moral and ethical issues shaping the upcoming elections (and global Christianity as well). And it will continue to inspire your spirit and biblical imagination.
Information. Inspiration. Imagination.
The Cottage’s mission is to strengthen and deepen your faith, enrich your understanding of the stories of scripture, enliven tradition and interfaith connections, and inspire clarity, courage, and compassion in our congregations and our lives for the sake of a better world.
You can expect online companionship to strengthen your journey throughout 2024.
Let our New Year’s resolution be this:
We will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity,
in the finest sense of the word.
— Göran Persson, former Prime Minister of Sweden
So, yesterday, walking in the woods, the
woods gave me a lesson
on memorial
days. We die quietly, the trees
murmured, without fanfare
without eulogy,
& yet our memorial
goes on for days,
for years,
you are walking through it. Without
eulogy?
I asked. What is language
for then? & there was all around me a kind
of mirth.
You are walking through it, the hawthorne
bushes shyly exclaimed, the meandering
brook.
Conscientious Objection
There are no parades for us, no salutes,
none of the vocabulary of jingoism
marshalled into sonorous odes or empty
platitudes. No. For us history’s silence.
And yet, oddly, we are the patriots.
What do I want? I want a three-legged
stool to sit on with my grandchildren & my
neighbors. Three sturdy legs: economic
equality. Environmental sustainability.
Equity. Big words for simple things. Enough.
Green. Justice. Enough, & not more, okay.
*
It is good, it is very good, on Memorial
Day to be reminded of amazement.
We remember such questionable things
otherwise on this day, & trot out such
wornout vocabulary, such ‘european’
nonsense. I went for a long walk in the woods
yesterday. The trees taught me a long lesson:
Die, as you lived, quietly, immediately
turning over, as you did all your life,
all your assets to the common good. Remember.
Thank you!!