Time's Almost Up! What Will Be Your Life's Legacy?

“You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”  --Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol”

What will be my legacy?

I always return to this question as one year ends and another begins and, in the case of 2020, as one decade fades into history and another decade prepares to take center stage. Not sure just why that curious query enters my thoughts now.  Maybe it’s because as I age and another “Happy New Year!” rings out, I realize that there are more “Auld Ang Synes” behind me than before me. That my chances to make a mark in this world are limited by time and fate.

And so, I wonder…what will be my legacy?

What will I be remembered for, after I leave this earth and return to the Creator who made me? How about you? What will be your legacy? The life you will leave behind, the lives of others you touched and made better, or did not? The life of the community you lived in that is a better place, or is not, because you called that part of Creation home?

How do you want to be remembered?

It’s tempting to see these questions as somehow morbid, or too tender or too scary to ask. I get that. Who wants to imagine this life without one’s self? Yet the truth is we are all born and we all live and we will all die, all of us, one day, perhaps in a very long time or perhaps sooner than we think.  God only knows when that time will come, so it seems to me imperative that every once in a while—like on the eve of another New Year’s Eve—we should think about this. My legacy. Reflect on this. Our legacies.

Not in material things, in what we will to our heirs. As a lifelong enthusiastic consumer, I know I put far too much stock into what I have, what I possess, what I own, what earthy things are “important” to me right now. We all do. We’ve got stuff, after all. Lots of stuff. Too much stuff. I’ve got a big house full of so many things. Though I fantasize that my stuff is precious, the reality is that all of these things; they will eventually rust and they will decay and they will fall apart and one day be no more, consigned to the landfill or the Salvation Army.   

I mean really: will anyone want the legacy…of my big screen TV? Or my thousands of books (mostly science fiction) or my collection of far too many coffee mugs (don’t ask) or the broken snowblower in the garage I will surely fix someday (not!)? To me that’s not a legacy, not in the truest sense. The world may tell us that she who dies with the most toys wins, but to God? To life? To those we leave behind? Stuff is just stuff. Disposable. Here today. Gone tomorrow. 

The real legacy of life is an accumulation of the tens of thousands of daily moral and ethical and spiritual choices that we make each day.  How we decide to live: this alone will determine our most important legacy on that last day.    

Did our one life make a difference for the good? Did we use that life, a gift to us from our generous Creator, for the good, for the positive, and in service to others? Did we forgive quickly and love boldly? Were we merciful to the very young and to the very old? Did we help those who struggled in life: the poor, the sick, the lonely, the powerless? Were we good citizens and did we give ourselves over to some cause or ideal greater than ourselves? Did we laugh too often and cry too deeply and live with reckless joy and take risks and fall down and get back up and try again? Did we live with humility, knowing that we were just another bozo on the bus of life, no greater, no worse, than any of our fellow passenger?

Legacy.

Or did we live for self alone?  Did we mock or tear down others to build our own selves up? Did we seek power for the sake of power, or use the authority we had over others to exploit or hurt them or to add to our own largesse? Did we take the gift of our body but then not treat it well? Were we quick to judge and slow to accept? Were we miserly with our money, hoarding it all for ourselves? Did we imagine that the way we lived: this alone was the answer for everyone else’s life too? Did we live with cynicism, expecting the worst, or live with apathy, leaving the work of life up to others? Did we imagine ourselves better than others? Did we die with a house full of possessions and a full bank account but with a sparsely attended memorial service?

What will be our legacy?

The good news is that if we are reading this, the legacy question has yet to be answered. I know I’ve still got lots of work to do in the year ahead. 

Happy New Year. Happy legacy too.

In Late December, Can We Make Peace With the Dark?

“Though my soul may rise in darkness, it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly, to be fearful of the night.”   --Sarah Williams, 1868

Five a.m., give or take a few minutes, depending upon how many times I hit the snooze button on my alarm clock.  That’s the time I arise every Sunday morning to prepare for my biggest work day of the week. Most of the natural year, save for a handful of weeks at the height of summer, this time is marked by little or no light outdoors in the pre-dawn, save for the streetlamps or the stars in the sky or a pale yellow moon. 

In the dark.

All is quiet save for a few souls who accompany me in welcoming that darkness. There’s the Mom driving kids to hockey, an early morning runner quietly passing by with her breath billowing out in chilly clouds and a nurse who has the early shift at the hospital and sips her coffee and imagines the day ahead. When I was kid, I fell into this routine of getting up in the dark because it was my job to awaken as early as 4 a.m. and deliver the morning newspapers. Maybe that’s why I still so love the dark, the night, the evening, the shadows, the hushed quiet, when seemingly everyone else is asleep, but I get to be up.

In the dark.  

Which we must confess gets a pretty bad rap in this life from most humans. The dark. The dusk. The gloom. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!!” That introduction to an old 1930’s radio show pretty much sums up how most of us view the darkness. It is a place of the unknown, of mystery and fear, of something or someone who lurks, waiting to threaten us and all because we cannot see them, hidden as they are, and why?

Well, it’s dark.

The shady superhero Batman is always called the Dark Knight. Bruce Springsteen sings of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” as a place where he confronts his worst demons, in the dark, of course. As kids it was the dark forbidding space in the closet across the room or the darkness under the bed that scared us the most: hence the need for a nightlight. “Dark Shadows” scared us all as a cheesy vampire soap opera that ran on TV in the 1960’s.

According to the Merriam-Websters Dictionary, there are at least 143 synonyms for dark and some 284 other “dark” related words and a quick run through that list reveals not one positive word or association. There’s dim, murky, obscure, somber, and dull to name but a few. Add in bad, nefarious, evil, immoral, rotten and sinful and the trend is clear.  We humans, even after millions of years of existence—we’ve yet to make peace with the dark.

But in December, especially in late December in the Northern Hemisphere, the truth is we have no choice. On the 21^st we experience the absolute darkest time of year, winter solstice, when the sun is tilted most far away from mother earth and so on that day, nature barely ekes out nine hours of sunlight. Even the light that does show up is still kind of dark: winter light, so often diffuse, muted, flat even.

Still, I’ve grown to love the dark. 

Maybe it’s because I remember we humans actually lived in the dark for the first nine months of life, in the warm and enveloping waters of the maternal womb. Maybe it’s because I love all the outside lights that my neighbors display in December, everything from one, simple illuminated candle in the window to over the top displays of blinking lights, thousands of lights, covering whole yards and even whole houses, blazing and twinkling in reds and greens and whites and blues. Our holiday lights would not be as special or beautiful if we had 24/7 sunshine.

No. We need the dark to love the light.

Even the sacred and holy tales we tell ourselves this time of year: without the dark of night, they’d never have happened. And so, the story is told of three astrologers from the east 2,000 years ago, who used just one star in the night to make a long, long trip across deserts and valleys, all to visit a baby king. And so, the story is told of a faithful people who defeated an occupying army and when they went to the Temple to light a holy menorah, even though there was only enough oil for one night, the light blazed on for eight nights. And so, Creation itself could not have come into being if not first for the darkness, the void, from which everything came forth.

Even as some speak of living in dark times now, as a nation and a world, even then this darkness can be seen as a gift, for at its best, the dark inspires us to push back against it. Push back against the bad times and the bad news and instead light and live just one candle of hope. That’s all it takes to pierce the darkness. Just one light.  In the darkest days we remember times past when our forebears somehow survived the dark and emerged into the light.  They embraced and moved through the dark. 

We can too.

So, we thank you December, for the dark. For the contrast it offers. For the beauty it embodies in just one star shining bright in a black night sky. For the hope it challenges us to have as humans, especially before the sun comes up.

We of the dark. We of the light.

Listen to the Evergreen Trees. They've a Story to Tell

“Nature has many scenes to exhibit….She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment….Some green she thinks so good for our eyes that, like blue, she never banishes it entirely from our eyes, but has created evergreens.”

--Henry David Thoreau

This is a tale of trees. December trees.

Not until the night of December 24^th—that’s when my family finally decorated the evergreen Christmas tree my Dad had purchased at a local farm stand and then dragged into the house, a river of needles marking that pathway. Then he stood it up in our rickety old stand with help from us kids, all of us barking out conflicting commands to place it just so. “Right! No left! It’s crooked! Okay…a little more…perfect!” And then that green symbol of life, of life that does not end, even when the cold comes and the snow falls and the rest of nature sleeps; the tree stayed up right through a new year’s evening. 

That’s the story of the tree in my childhood home. What’s your tree’s story, your tree traditions, your winter greenery rituals?

Is your tree a “real tree”, green, growing, alive? Then you are with the 30 million other Americans who last month and this month will purchase an evergreen that is truly “ever green”, at least until it is discarded post holidays and holy days. If your tree tastes run more to the faux and artificial, then you stand with about 25 million other folks who, because of convenience or tradition or economics, display a tree, that while not a real tree, still stands tall and green and with a bonus. No watering. No fire hazards. No throwing it out. Just pack it up until next year.

Though we might assume the yuletide ritual of putting a living tree inside the house began in Christian circles, the answer is quite older and ancient. Humans, beginning with folks like the Vikings who practiced earth based religions, began bringing greens and greenery into the home thousands of years ago.  When winter was so long, the greens reminded them that spring would come back again. Then the Romans displayed greens in their domiciles to mark the festival of Saturnalia, a holiday celebrating the god Saturn, that ran from December 17^th to the 23^rd.

The modern evergreen tree movement began either in Latvia or Germany (both claim that first)  beginning in the 1500’s and immigrants from those countries brought their traditions with them here to the United States. But if you tried to put up a tree or sing carols or take work off on the 25^th in Puritan Massachusetts you were out of luck.  The Massachusetts Bay Colony actually outlawed the celebration of Christmas for a time in the 1600’s.

Ho, ho, ho? No, no, no.

Which reminds us that for all the assumption we might make about the holidays and holy days we celebrate this month—like that there is one “right” way to mark the season, limited to one religion or one inviolable tradition or one type of tree--that’s not really true. That’s a good thing.

There is a wild and wonderful democracy to this holiday, thank God.

We are free to put up a fresh green tree or a silver aluminum tree or place a twenty foot blow up Santa on the front lawn or light candles on the menorah or play elf on the shelf or go for out for Chinese food on the 25^th or maybe even work, like millions of police officers and firefighters and nurses and cab drivers and clerks and soldiers and clergy who will be on duty at month’s end, so we can have a day off.

My hope and prayer for all of us this month is simple. That as the big day approaches, each in our own ways: we might return to the rituals—like that tree—which make this time of year special, even magical, even holy, for us . That we each might give more to charity and show more compassion to those in need and slow down more and rest in the deep of winter and love more, our family and friends and neighbors and this beautiful and broken world. 

Maybe that’s what we can think of, pray for, ponder, when we see a snow covered evergreen holding vigil in the cold, or a lit up tree twinkling in the window.

That’s my tale of the trees and this special month. What’s yours’?