Happy New Year!

 
On this quiet, cold New Year’s morning, somehow I am thinking of an old bit in Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy act of the early 1990s. Seinfeld waxed nostalgic about the old days when your family’s TV Guide came in the mail. Jerry reminded us of the excitement and how we would revere the NEW TV Guide and all the promise it held for the upcoming week….ahhhh…the newness of the new Guide! You kept it as pristine as you could for as long as you could. Then as the week went on, it lost its luster, and by the end of that week, the dog-eared, old, worn-out copy, well, you couldn’t wait to get rid of it! I remember laughing knowingly with Jerry’s bit about how a family treated a TV Guide and the cycle it went through.

Well, don’t we treat a new year in much the same way? We welcome a new year with such promise and care, and 364 days from now, we will be happy to bid this year a good riddance. Is each year like the old TV Guide of the old days????? Hmmm….

And of course, just thinking about that begs the thought about how every arrival portends a leave-taking. Every birth portends its own death.

Oh, great! And Happy New Year to you too, some blog reader will grouse!!

Every birth portends its own death. Why does that thought leave us so uncomfortable?

The Christmas story has this thought about birth and death around its edges. Thousands of portraits of Madonna and the Christ child show a wistful Mary—she is aware of her young newborn son’s impending death. Every arrival portends a leave-taking. Every birth—even Jesus’ birth—portends its own death. The Magi knew it. When the wise men, or magi, or kings, or astrologers, or whoever they were, arrive to see this special child, they arrive with old men’s gifts: frankincense and myrrh. Spices with which to prepare the body for burial. Yeah, great. Happy Birthday, Jesus!

So on this New Year’s Day, this first day of the crisp, newly-minted new year, what a strange thing to think about death. I mean, let’s face it…we will die. Each of us. All of you. Every single one of you.

The death rate among us: 100%.

The death rate among us, including Jesus: 100%. We know it: this hard-as-steel-truth. But it’s not easy to face. Not easy to bear. Not easy to talk about especially, God help us, with our own families.

So let’s return to Mary, the teen-age Palestinian girl who bears the Christ child. How was she able to understand this certain transition from life to death so well? She is tuned in, even seemingly reconciled to the hard-as-steel-fact of passing on. Mary figures out the secret to being reconciled to death: Mary links the fact of passing on (the fact of her own passing on) with the art of passing down ... of bequeathing.

Think of Mary’s song, her “Magnificat,” as her last will and testament. In it she bequeaths her son to the ages.

As if the gift of her son is not enough, there is more. This young woman, this girl-child, gifts us with a song – a song that is itself a kind of kaleidoscope: with shifting and overlapping glimpses and fragments of past and future, of ancestors and descendants, of remembrance and inheritance, of a promise that shimmers and shifts in the light. A promise passed down and taken up: generation by generation, taken up, parent to child, teacher to student, down through the millennia. A promise taken up here as we conclude the season of Advent. A promise carried in white lights and fragrant greens, in memorial poinsettias, in carols and in candles to pierce the night.

Every birth portends its own death. Every arrival portends a leave-taking.

But, listen now! With every leave-taking, there can be a leaving, a bequeathing, a gifting, a passing down.

What will we gift? What will we pass down? On this beginning of 2014, this may take the sting out of death?

I suppose I am thinking about this on this new year’s morning since in 2013 there were some unexpected deaths of friends and friends of my family, and some close calls with sickness and cancer. I also turned 50, a half-century of time alive, and surely a time to wonder about mortality and our purpose.

Since I am a lover of music, comedy, and history, and I have already discussed Seinfeld and the Magnificat, let’s take a little look at history. Let’s remember Benjamin Franklin, that exciting man of the 18^th century. Benjamin Franklin, was like Mary, reconciled to his own dying and marvelously and wondrously tuned in to the way the generations are linked. He linked the fact of his own passing on to the art of passing down. Let’s listen to him through some of his last will:

I, Benjamin Franklin ... do make and declare my last will and testament as follows:
I have considered that, among artisans, good apprentices are most likely to make good citizens, and, having myself been bred to a manual art, printing, in my native town of Boston, and afterwards assisted to set up my business in Philadelphia by kind loans of money from two friends ... which was the foundation of my fortune ... I wish to be useful even after my death, if possible, in forming and advancing other young men, that may be serviceable to their country ... To this end ... I give one thousand pounds sterling to the inhabitants of the town of Boston ...

The said sum ... shall be managed under the direction of the selectmen, united with the ministers of the oldest Episcopalian, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches in that town, who are to let out the sum upon interest ... to assist young married artificers in setting up their business ... It is my desire that this institution should take place and begin to operate within one year after my decease ... In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and Seal this twenty-third day of June, Anno Domini one thousand Seven hundred and eighty nine.
B. Franklin.

The institution Benjamin Franklin imagined, and named and provided for in his will is located a few blocks from Copley Square in downtown Boston, the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology that educates young men and women of every nationality and ethnicity…educates and equips them with practical skills and technologies.

Benjamin Franklin has passed on…but not before passing down, not before gifting to the next generation a part of his own self and soul.

While we cannot all pass along large sums of money or property, we can pass along a legacy of integrity, of truthfulness, of humor, of good cheer. This Christmas season I am remembering the legacy of goodwill from my father’s friend Dick, who recently passed on. Dick died suddenly. When his son went through his father’s kitchen pantry, he found a surprising number of cake mix boxes. His asked my father about them. His son didn’t know his dad liked to bake. My father told him that Dick baked a lot of cakes—especially for people who might not get a cake. He baked for birthdays when he worried people might forget the birth of a new year for someone, or when he wanted to celebrate someone a little bit in his orbit. This big, strong-as-steel man with immense practical skill and knowledge gifted the people around him with a legacy of crumbs and icing.

We are reluctant to acknowledge the one truism: we will die. This embodied, earthly gig, this sweet, sweet gig—the one that comes with the taste of Graeter’s mint chocolate ice cream and the aroma of fresh ground coffee and the sound of an infant’s squeal—it is temporary.

I know you know it. But I also know it’s not easy to face. Not easy to bear. But again, let’s reflect on the Christmas story before we put everything away in boxes and out of sight for another 11 months. Let’s look at Mary’s story and her reconciliation of the hard-as-steel fact of passing on with the strong, imaginative, generative, affectionate art of passing down, of bequeathing.

Every arrival portends a leave-taking. But we get to make choices about what we will pass down, what we will bequeath. I suppose that if we take up the art of passing down, it will soothe the sting of passing on.

So Mere Mortal, let me put the challenge clear on this first day of the new year. How might your dying beget a birthing? How might you gift the generations to follow? How might you take up the strong, imaginative, generative and affectionate art of passing down? Happy New Year!