A Happy New Year

When I was a child, my paternal grandparents, who were Disciples of Christ ministers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, were among my favorite people. To me, they represented everything about the world that was good and true and kind. I saw them as being vitally important to their small rural community. There were no psychotherapists in those parts and Prozac hadn’t been invented yet. Whenever a parishioner became ill, their tobacco crop failed, or their tractor broke down, my grandparents were always there to help. I remember seeing my grandfather hike down the hill from the parsonage to make pastoral visits at Marymount Hospital in the mornings, and I watched him write his sermons as he sat at his big oak roll top desk. My grandmother taught a Bible Study class on Wednesday evenings, and she even had her own radio show on a Christian station for awhile, providing messages of hope and comfort for listeners. She tirelessly cranked out bulletins for the Sunday services on an old mimeograph machine in the church basement, and sometimes she would let me help her pick out beautiful images of religious art for the bulletin cover. I saw their work as being the most important thing in the world.

My grandparents met each other in a holler known as Grassy Creek, when she was 16 years old and he was 17. They got married and started having kids. Many years after they had passed away, I found out something very interesting about them. My grandfather wanted to be a farmer, but he didn’t have any money to buy land. My uncle Jim, one of their three sons, told me that when he was a small child, he remembered seeing them sitting together at their kitchen table, leafing through college catalogs and trying to choose a course of study. They decided to enroll together in Lexington Theological Seminary to earn their ministerial degrees.

So I realized that they didn’t receive a divine calling to be ministers. Their decision to spend their lives serving a faith community was voluntary rather than demanded of them by a supreme being. It was a conscious choice. As a liberal Unitarian Universalist, this insight made me appreciate my grandmother and grandfather even more.

I am a continuation of my grandparents. Although my chosen profession is in the healthcare field rather than the ministry, I hope someday to provide spiritual care for others. Jack and I got out of bed early this morning, and drove a bit bleary-eyed to a Tibetan Buddhist First Light New Years Ceremony, where we meditated, chanted, and lit 108 beautiful candles with a small group of people. In this type of ceremony, prayers for peace are made at the beginning of the first day of the new year. With groups participating worldwide, Buddhists greet the first light across the planet in a continuous wave of prayer. I cannot think of a more important or meaningful way to spend New Years Day. Whenever I engage in spiritual practices, I feel my close to my grandparents, I am peaceful and happy, and all is right with my world.

Peace and Happy New Year to all!