The new year and some personal vistas have me thinking about beginnings and endings. New starts and death.

Death. Recent events of shocking tragedy, or the sense, which perhaps an ill loved one or an aging pet strengthens, of the soft creep towards it. How I hold death at arm’s length and also invite it in. By that I mean, and perhaps it’s some reptilian brain, survival tactic, that even as I reject and repel worst case scenarios, I see, for example, the white muzzle and arthritic limp of my dog and allow a flash of the future without him to enter. What will that reality feel like? How will I react?

More often than not the flash forward resolves as a moment of appreciation. Like Scrooge and the ghost of Christmas yet to come, seeing the empty chair of Tiny Tim, to wake up and find it is not real, or rather not yet, and to be filled with gratitude and appreciation for more time.

More time. A new year. A transition that feels unique in its equal parts thrill of “blank slate” and also unyielding demand to reflect and acknowledge all that went into yet another tally mark of experience. A time when that juxtaposition of opposing forces, the cry to bullishly move on, but also pause and remember, is welcomed and celebrated, more so than any other time of year.

I’ve been thinking about the impact of the stories we tell each other about the past, and the different circles and circumstances in which those stories are shared. How death often serves as a marker to map timelines in family stories (like, “that was the Christmas before grandpa died”). How we bring those who have passed with us, passing them – or a version of them – on to our children. I’d like to think that act is more often than not a gift. Cynthia and her puppets, for example. My children never meeting her but having a concept of and connection to her. Scaffolding between a generation she would have utterly loved, and who get to love her, or at least a vision of her that we create for them.

However, I know it is just as often that we wish to leave behind the past, but can’t. There are memories that hurt and haunt and are passed onto the next generation, even if we’d rather keep them buried.

I’ve been thinking about how God and communities like this one are beacons when we are grappling with death, or when we are haunted. And how, while we may feel called most strongly to seek God at moments of despair, there is often a similar magnified heart-calling in moments of joy. Like a child reaching for a parent most intensely at the tails of the bell curve – needing comfort at our saddest and equally a witness to our greatest joys.

How beautiful to feel oneself connected to the holy spirit, and its iterations, through an appreciation of the human spirit, and how alike we are, truly, in the varied and seemingly disparate ways we navigate this world and contend with our finite time in it. How we can be both weighed down and buoyed by the past, by those who have passed. How, for better and sometimes for worse, in the moments we are presented a blank slate and fresh start, we fill the room and ourselves with ghosts. How, at this special time of year when we take stock of the pieces of ourselves and the patchwork of the last year in order to reassemble and reaffirm in the go-forward, we see, perhaps in sharper focus, the thread that is woven between years, between the living and the dead. How that compulsion to weave, how the thread itself, is on one hand so deeply human, and also seemingly so rooted in the holy.

This is a poem that has stuck with me this season, by Danusha Lameris, called “Small Kindnesses”.

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”