Gene LeCouteur
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church
Richmond, VA
Celtic Service
January 1, 2012
The Most Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Year B
“The Beauty We Love”
As holidays go New Year’s Eve is not my favorite. The culture tells me that in order to
celebrate properly I should get together with a few thousand of my closest friends, stay up late,
eat a lot of junk, and drink enough alcohol that I lose my inhibitions and perhaps do something
regrettable. The consequence is that when I wake up on New Year’s Day I will have a hangover,
a queasy stomach, I will be tired, and I will have a faint recollection that I may have misbehaved.
Now if the New Year is a time for starting over or at least making a new effort at living
my life well, another cultural expectation, this recipe for a great New Year’s Eve guarantees that
I will have failed before I have started. Therefore around my house New Year’s Eve usually goes
unobserved beyond the changing of the calendar and the burning of a bayberry candle. Some
would say that makes me a killjoy, a curmudgeon, or both.
My fondest memory of a New Year’s Eve celebration is from my childhood. It was the
first New Year’s Eve that my siblings and I got to stay up late. My parents made popcorn and
Lipton’s onion dip. We kids plopped down in front of the TV and watched the only movie that
was on that night—“Bell Book and Candle” starring Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak, Hermione
Gingold, and a cat named Pyewacket. What a great night! There I was surrounded by the people
closest to me, staying up late, eating junk, and drinking too much…soda. Now that’s a New
Year’s Eve to remember.
Maybe that is what our adult celebrations seek to reconnect with. That is, a sense of
community, joy, celebration, hope, and a little adventure. But it seems to me we get it all wrong.
The party ‘til you drop attitude does not get it, and my grumpy ignoring of the evening does not
capture it either. We wake up on New Year’s Day wondering what it was we missed and why the
evening did not seem more special.
Lately, poems by the Sufi mystic Rumi have been coming to me from many different
sources. One that I read the other day seemed particularly appropriate .
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
“Let the beauty we love be what we do.” That is what I yearn for. The beauty of
simplicity. The beauty of a family at peace for an evening. The beauty of love. The beauty of
hope beyond hopefulness. The beauty of a moment in time effortlessly fashioned, without
artifice, into a lifelong memory. And awaking the next morning knowing that something special
had happened, that was beyond compare.
If I had been wiser then I would have recognized that night as holy. I would have kissed
my parents and brother and sister and thanked them for that gift. I would have thanked God from
the depths of my soul for that joy. Instead, I thank them now.
Yes, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
2012 by Eugene LeCouteur