Once again we stand at the beginning of a new Georgian (calendar) year, which like each day offers new hope, new opportunities and new challenges. Many enter each New Year looking back–at past mistakes and accomplishments and at the number of those who did not make it through to rectify any wrong decisions, inappropriate behavior or to redirect any misspent energies and resources. Increasingly challenging is the ability to keep one’s head and hopes high amid the perpetual magnification and glorification of bad and depressing news from personal family to world family levels.
Through it all the predominant increasingly overworked word is “hero” which has become so common it is becoming offensive.
How very refreshing it was to hear over one local radio station this week the reminder that “There are no great people in this world. Only great challenges, which ordinary people arise to meet.” The same theory applies when referring to those with courage, generally perceived as strong and fearless. Courage is not the absence of fear, however, but rather varying degrees of temporary conquest over it. These extraordinary challenges often occur extemporaneously and the ordinary person or persons who happen to be closest at hand instinctively respond selflessly to the “great challenge” according to previously acquired attitudes and values. In the process of instilling such values into the children attending our last Saturday Session at the Community Action Center, one visiting child asked the meaning of the word “virtues” which we are in the process of learning the importance of, knowing and especially displaying in the life of each individual at the earliest staged of childhood and subsequent adulthood.
Therefore, as we stand at the brink of another New Year, may we at the beginning of each new day therein offer prayers, not for lighter burdens but for stronger backs; not to become “heroes” to be praised by the world but for spiritual transformation which will enable us as ordinary people to arise to extraordinary challenges with courageous conquest over whatever fear which stands to weaken us under any given circumstances. And in our common prayers for peace may we add those which will enable us to become instruments of that peace as stated in the timeless prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: “where there is hatred, let me sow love (seeking neither credit for nor benefit there from); where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O Devine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. In such instrumental spiritual state you may be assured of a Happy New Year.
