The ancient paths

At New Year we travelled to cousins in the north.  There we enjoyed a family party - unfortunately S and G couldn't come as they were with their respective fiances in the south, but we had a great time catching up with 24 relatives we hadn't seen for a while.

After the party and the games and the fireworks on New Year's Eve, husband R led a short reflection for the family on New Year's Day, based on a verse from the book of the prophet Jeremiah: 'Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.' (Chapter 6, verse 16)

He talked about how the life of faith does not always have a single, easy answer when hard things happen. He talked about how we all make mistakes, and fail to live up to what we hope to be, but it's OK to say sorry and start again - indeed that is the basis of our faith.

And he talked about how the ancient paths can be the traditional ways that earlier generations have found helpful - maybe the old prayers, or some of the old customs, or the old communities.  It seems a strange message in a world where the new is what we prize, but it felt strangely comforting, and redolent of dim churches, smelling of wax and incense, and with the ghosts of harmonising voices hanging in the air.

I will draw on some of this as I go forward into 2014, facing all sorts of new things.  When daughter S returned from her New Year celebrations, she'd been making wedding invitations, and gave us the first one (an invitation from ourselves, as the bride's parents, to ourselves!).  I felt tearful.  I didn't cry when she tried on the wedding dress she finally bought (although some of the earlier ones she tried on had raised a tear) but the invitations brought home again that the weddings are soon, and after them the household will be different - not for a term or two, like when the children went to university, but for good.

But the ancient ways remind me of the old rhythms of life - the rites of passage around birth, marriage and death; the ceremonies and rituals that have been created over the centuries to help give weight to the changes we know are important, and want to mark appropriately.

These will create for me a framework for the changes I'm facing, some rules to follow which will help to make it easier to go through the changes.  We've used wording on the invitation that was on our wedding invitation.  We will follow a marriage service which has evolved over hundreds of years.  And we will weave into the celebrations some of the traditions of the other culture into which daughter S is marrying.

Doing this will give a richness to the changes which also provides a mitigation to the difficult aspects - the partings, the new ways of relating that we will have to develop. We join the ancient paths, and they turn out to be the familiar paths that have been trodden by so many before us.

The best thing about this week was the amazing firework with which we celebrated the New Year - it went on for two minutes and was completely spectacular.
And I've just listened for the last time this Christmas season to John Rutter's beautiful Christmas Album.
The worst thing was missing the toy duck race on New Year's Day because of a migraine brought on by all the excitement of Christmas and too much cheese, red wine and chocolate.  But my duck won even though I wasn't there.