More Thoughts on the New Year

I am always happy to receive a regular newsletter by Maria Popova titled, The Marginalian. A recent edition looked like it could serve for some reflection on the New Year widening in front of us as you are reading this. Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-raised author, poet, literary and arts commentator, and a cultural critic who weaves ample information from science and philosophy into her writing. Occasionally, she will include religious thinkers. In short, Maria Popova is what we can call a true polymath, a person interested in all forms of learning and shares it with her readers. (See below if you wish to subscribe.)

The day I read her piece on “Resolutions for a Life Worth Living…” I attended a funeral service during which one of the participants read from the Book of Ecclesiastes (3:1-15). As one of the 15 Wisdom Books in the Hebrew Scriptures, Ecclesiastes is not a moribund lecture on virtue, life, and death. It is somewhat upbeat and hopeful, an excellent choice for a service for the dead. This section is the binary, poetic movement describing a “time for every affair under the heavens.” If we listen thoughtfully or read it slowly, we see that the writer tells us that God’s beneficent love takes care of us no matter what we are experiencing in this period of time we call ‘life.’

Popova lists several famous thinkers in her ‘Resolutions’ who can relate to the biblical aphorisms in Ecclesiastes. Let’s go through them.

Love Without Fear.  Popova chose Hannah Arendt for this resolution because Arendt spent her life as a Jewish immigrant during the Nazi purge, and as a doctoral student in philosophy wrote her dissertation on Saint Augustine titled, “Love and Saint Augustine.” Arendt says, “Fearlessness is what love seeks.” Ecclesiastes says, “There is a time to love and a time to hate…”  Be strong enough to love and to challenge what dissipates love.

Cherish Your Body.  Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize winning book, Beloved, is a masterpiece on cherishing what God has given you. Morrison uses her description of the body as something to be cherished even as owners of slaves whipped the flesh of their slaves and starved them. “Love your heart,” says Morrison, “for this is the prize.” We can resolve to care more for the body we have which is free, but occasionally needs a “time to be healed.”

Have More Music and Nature in Your Life. “Without music, life would be a mistake,” wrote Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist/writer who survived concentration camps in Germany. He claimed that “music is the profoundest expression of nature.” His optimistic move to find the deepest source of meaning is captured in his book, “Yes to Life.” For this New Year, one might resolve to learn more about music, all kinds of music, and to explore nature and become lovingly, environmentally concerned, and active. It can be a “time to plant…and a time to uproot the plant.”

Choose Kindness. Leo Tolstoy began writing “A Calendar of Wisdom,” a type of diary when he wanted to reckon with his soul and “life expectancy.” Kindness features quite a bit in the book. He wrote, “The kinder and more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.” Further, “Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than kindness.” Our biblical injunction says, “There is a time to embrace and a time to be far from embraces.” We can all make a resolution to be kinder, to adopt a mindset that our first reaction to anything will be kindness. Embrace the person. If a world-famous novelist like Tolstoy could be concerned about being kind, well, that says something to me. The time not to embrace might require some thinking and decision making on political issues that press on you rather than release you. This year will be full of challenges politically to be kind and yet aware and committed to a greater good. Reflect on this often with prayer and solid information.

Popova also presented a few other famous writers and thinkers who inspire us with their encouragement and personal sharing on the kind of resolutions we can make to be happier and more human in our lives, but I don’t have room for all of them. Her final resolution was her own:

Choose the Eyes of Love. Popova says that “What we see is never raw reality—what we see is our interpretation of reality…often the lens we mistake for a magnifying glass turns out to be a warped mirror—we see others not as they are, but as we are.” So, let’s observe and look and embrace others “confused and self-concerned as they may be, with the eyes of love and to resist for as long as possible the cataract of judgment (that) occlude(s) our view.”

Can we resolve, or at least include in our spiritual wish list the following: 

Love Without Fear, Cherish Your Body, Have More Music, Choose Kindness, Choose Eyes of Love? 

Reflection

I was struck by how Popova’s essay relates to Ecclesiastes in the Bible. As you continue to think about your journey for the coming year, it would be wise to ponder on Ecclesiastes, 3:1-15. Take it slowly to your prayer. Read it carefully. What will you face this year? “A time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to dance?” Will you engage in “a time to seek and a time to lose?” Ask for the grace to accept whatever comes. It will not always be happy, but it will always be what God has willed.

If the artists and philosophers and writers that Popova brings into her professional orbit, can give us so much to think about and pray over, we should be ecstatic to see the universality of God’s love and inspiration in writers and artists and scientists…and farmers, and manufacturers, and window washers, and car mechanics and all who make our glorious world hum to the cadence of His Will!!!  

Be blessed my friends as you seek to gain traction in these early moments of the New Year. 

Maria Popov Newsletter: newsletter@brainpickings.org