Last Year's Words

‘For the last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. and to make an end is to make a beginning.’ ~T. S. Eliot

These are thought-provoking words with which to begin a new year. Can I, or even do I want, to leave the words, and by extension the happenings, of last year behind? Do I really want to see the new year as the beginning of something new? How much baggage do I want to being with me? Do I actually need to bring any of it? These are all questions I have been asking myself over the last few weeks.

New Year’s thoughts aside, these are challenging words for anytime. I know that I do not always see an end as the beginning, right then, of something new. Yet even the grieving that accompanies the end of something is in fact a new beginning, a new way of coping, a new understanding of reality coming into fruition.

‘For the last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.’

How often do we try to use the words of the previous reality to explain the present? Sometimes it doesn’t matter but often it does. Sometimes when we used the words of a former time to explain a current situation, the meaning from the former time does not come along with the words. And so while the words remain the same, the meaning has morphed into something quite different.

Sometimes, the words of yesteryear are simply not sufficient to express the new reality we face. That is when we need to ditch the old vocabulary and use new words to express that new reality.

Both of these examples I believe apply to our understanding of spirituality and the divine. We attempt to use the language of those who have gone before to explain our present understandings. Just the other day I heard a lady say [in all earnestness] that she couldn’t read those new translations of the Bible because they changed the words that were in the King James version. And those changed words were WRONG! One very good example of not leaving the words of the past, in the past. And I can only begin to imagine how much damage ideas like hers have done to the current perception of religion. Similarly we use the words from the past in our religious services the sound of which may be soothing to us because of our long-term familiarity with them but are meaningless to anyone who might wander in. I attended a Christmas Carol service this year where the words of the Christmas story were read from the NRSV and I found myself ‘translating’ them into the language of the King James bible in my head because that was what I had learned had as child. We like and want that which is familiar. That however does not mean (a) that it is the most correct or (b) that everyone else prefers it as well - something we all need to remember whenever change is proposed.

‘I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.’ Isaiah 43:19

And so I challenge you as we start 2015, to let ‘last year’s words stay in last year …and in 2015, to use new words to tell your new story.

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