Daily Reading for December 31 • The Eve of the Holy Name
Something about this time of year makes us resolve to do all manner of things better. Almost all our good intentions will be history in a week or two. But there is also that other aspect of this time of year, the part that taps us on the shoulder and whispers that our lives are speeding away, faster and faster, evaporating as we speak. That there is not much time left. That soon we will be gone.
At the end of the year we remember the other years. Look at photos of people who are gone. See our young selves—they, too, are gone. We marvel at them. Was that party really sixty years ago? Was I ever that young?
Yes, comes the answer from the pictures. You were. You still are. I’m still here, inside you, your eighteen-year-old self. But remember, we are leaving soon. Good-bye, good-bye.
The only remedy for that sorrow is a life well lived now. “Love well that which thou must leave ere long,” Shakespeare wrote, and he was right.
Don’t let a day of the new year pass without marking it, because it will be gone when it is over. Put into your days the things you want there—no one else will fill them for you. Anything we have can be taken from us at a moment’s notice. Some of the people in our old photographs are dead already, and one day we will be, as well, and no one knows when.
But today is ours.
From Let Us Bless the Lord, Year One: Meditations on the Daily Office, Advent through Holy Week by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 2004. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com