This week finds me reflecting on the gift of life. Perhaps this is a common practice at this cusp of a new year. As we make resolutions for yet another year of living, perhaps it is really a recommitment to the gift of life, a subtle, often unconscious re-upping to live fully, intentionally. Maybe those commitments to lose weight, to exercise more, to save money, to read or write, to create, to clean and organize are really another attempt to say ‘I am in this for the long haul. I am planning to become the best life-liver I can possibly be’. Maybe they are not just ego-driven attempts to be thinner, richer, more appealing.

I know I have been suspended in this reflective place because it has been my gift to be present, this week in particular, to the mystery of this living. On one day, one twenty-four hour slice of life, I was privileged to be in the presence of one who was leaving this earth too early. On the same day I was waiting to hear of one who was coming into the world earlier than expected. Each hand, my full heart, held both birth and death. The magnitude of it was not lost on me.

It is easy to be cavalier in the living of our days, to behave as if it will all last forever, as if each day isn’t a miracle unfolding. Minutes, whole hours, full days and entire years can be frittered away with details that in the grand scheme mean little or nothing. But the attention to the pure gift of living can have the ability to change the most ordinary day into a miraculous one. Isn’t it what we all want, really? To be present to the goodness of our own beating heart and the beauty of traveling this amazing planet? To notice the faces, the lives that travel with us, whose very living makes ours worthwhile? To know that our living is making an imprint in the world? To remember that the One who breathed us into being still fills our lungs, our cells with life?

Of course in times like this the words of Mary Oliver float through my head. She has the ability to cut to the quick for me what my own rambling brain can’t quite articulate:

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

Beginning this new year, knowing that at all times we are held between the mystery of life and death, I am re-committing to living in amazement, to taking the world into my arms. Both poles of life can come early, without our bidding, this we know. And so, this new year may we all be held in the grace of those who are not just visiting but are living into this full-bodied gift.

Amen and amen.