By Alliance President Terry Gips
It’s a New Year and rather than starting it off with resolutions for weight loss, we want to take you higher with three meaningful and impactful messages that touched us…and we hope you. Together they can help us heal and overcome our uncivil wars.
First, take two minutes to experience the cool, collaborative We Believe… video from the diverse Minneapolis Downtown Congregations Clergy affirming the need for dignity, safety and belonging for Minnesota’s immigrant and refugee neighbors.
It calls for us to stand together and choose compassion, care and solidarity. It invites us to build a future grounded in hope, shared responsibility and freedom from fear.
Second, groove with this musical video version of This is the New Year, the upbeat, breakout Billboard Top 40 hit from 2014. It was written and sung by college friends and NY singers/songwriters Ian Axel and Chad King by their duo group named, A Great Big World, which has nearly 4 million Spotify views.
They produced an official video and the song was further popularized when it was performed on TV by Glee, including some vibrant dancing and a stirring uplift of a cast member in a wheel chair.
We chose this unusual version because of its creative mix of dancing, playfulness and use of highlighting the song’s moving words and phrases in social media posts sent by various people (at first seemingly odd), which I wish will deeply touch and hopeify you as it did us:
And finally, enter into this powerful poem of possibility, New Day’s Lyric, from the incomparable Amanda Gorman, the first person to be named National Youth Poet Laureate. I always marvel at how she consistently captures our country’s heart amidst our most complex, heaviest times with her wise, poignant, hopeful and to-the-point word choices and phrasing.
With her inclusive approach, she reframes our concept of who we are and who we can be. Though written amidst the COVID-19 epidemic on December 31, 2021, her poem is perfect for this moment of pain, grief and need for reconnection and possibility as we prepare for MLK Day.
New Day’s Lyric
by Amanda Gorman
May this be the day
We come together.
Mourning, we come to mend,
Withered, we come to weather,
Torn, we come to tend,
Battered, we come to better.
Tethered by this year of yearning,
We are learning
That though we weren’t ready for this,
We have been readied by it.
We steadily vow that no matter
How we are weighed down,
We must always pave a way forward.
This hope is our door, our portal.
Even if we never get back to normal,
Someday we can venture beyond it,
To leave the known and take the first steps.
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next.
What was cursed, we will cure.
What was plagued, we will prove pure.
Where we tend to argue, we will try to agree,
Those fortunes we forswore, now the future we foresee,
Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake;
Those moments we missed
Are now these moments we make,
The moments we meet,
And our hearts, once all together beaten,
Now all together beat.
Come, look up with kindness yet,
For even solace can be sourced from sorrow.
We remember, not just for the sake of yesterday,
But to take on tomorrow.
We heed this old spirit,
In a new day’s lyric,
In our hearts, we hear it:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
Be bold, sang Time this year,
Be bold, sang Time,
For when you honor yesterday,
Tomorrow ye will find.
Know what we’ve fought
Need not be forgot nor for none.
It defines us, binds us as one,
Come over, join this day just begun.
For wherever we come together,
We will forever overcome.
Don’t miss Amanda Gorman’s captivating video with music sharing her poem.