Once Upon a New Year's Eve
Illustration
Stories
Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth
and thick darkness the peoples,
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you. (vv. 1-2)
It was the coldest night of the year, that New Year’s Eve in 1968. The thermometer on the light pole on the path down to the barn read 50 below zero by the time we got home from church at 1:00 A.M. Dad insisted that we go into the barn and make sure the drinking cups had not frozen.Most of the cows were lying down in their stalls. The cats were curled up on a pile of straw bales at the end of the driveway. The dog, sensing no need to sound an alarm, yipped lightly and greeted us groggily. The barn was cozy and warm from the body heat of 35 Holsteins and assorted calves and heifers. The drinking cups and the pipes in the milk house were fine. There would be no watery mess for Dad to clean up when he returned to start the milking at 4:30.
It had been Dad’s idea to go to the Watch Night service at the church in Ithaca, Wisconsin, our sister church served by the same pastor, and just eight miles down the road from our own church in Loyd. Mom and little sister hadn’t wanted to go, so it was just Dad and us three boys who piled into the old Rambler. It was after nine o’clock, our regular bedtime if it had been a school night. We headed down State Highway 58 through Loyd, past the one-room schoolhouse where I had been incarcerated on weekdays for eight long years before starting high school at Ithaca in 1965.
It was a still night, and the absence of wind made the bitter cold almost pleasant. The road was clear of ice and snow; the stars were shining bright overhead, and the moon was climbing steadily toward the Big Dipper, its light reflecting so brightly off the drifts in the hayfields in the freezing crisp air that we hardly needed the headlights. The almost full moon looked different that night, or at least we saw it differently. Only eight days before, three earthlings had orbited the moon eight times, a first step in human history before the big step onto the surface of the moon a few months later.
On Christmas Eve, the astronauts Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman took turns reading from the first chapter of Genesis in the stirring poetry of the King James Bible. When Anders proclaimed, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and Borman concluded with “…and God saw that it was good,” the whole world looked up to the heavens with new eyes. We heard their plaintive voices in the barn, echoing all the way from the moon, 238,855 miles to the radio over the calf pen. The memory of it still gives me chills.
A raccoon ran across the road in front of us just as we passed through Neptune, where cars were parked two and three deep around the Black Cat Supper Club. They were having a different kind of Watch Night service, with spirits unfamiliar to us teetotaling Methodists. John and his brother, Charles Wesley, the founders of our movement, were drinkers of malt ale but advised church members to “taste no spirituous liquor.”
We went on past Elephant Trunk Rock and arrived in Ithaca just as the Watch Night vigil was getting started in the church basement, with games and non-spirituous hot chocolate. After several rounds of Chinese checkers and dart ball—followed by snacks of venison sausage, saltine crackers, buttered rye bread, some sweet gherkins pickles, generous slices of award-winning Wisconsin cheddar, leftover Christmas cookies, and fruitcake—we headed upstairs to the sanctuary around 11:40 for the Watch Night Service.
The frigid air seeped through the stained glass windows so that I found myself shivering as we sang “Amazing Grace” and Charles Wesley’s great old gathering hymn, “And Are We Yet Alive?”: “What troubles have we seen, what mighty conflicts past, fightings without, and fears within, since we assembled last!”
I thought of all that had rocked our lives in the turbulent year that was 1968: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which took the lives of over 70,000 Vietnamese and nearly 17,000 Americans, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April, and the violence that followed in cities throughout the country; the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in June, and the police riot in response to the street protests against the Viet Nam War at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. And I said a prayer for my cousins, Verne Long Jr. and Richard Sumwalt, who were among the 500,000 American troops fighting in Viet Nam.
Charles Wesley’s words, written some two hundred years earlier, gave hope and comfort: “Yet out of all the Lord hath brought us by his love; and still he doth his help afford, and hides our life above.”
That Watch Night was the first time I had heard John Wesley’s Covenant Prayer, which he adapted in 1755 from the 1663 version by the Puritan Richard Allen. It warmed my heart on that bitter-cold New Year’s Eve in 1968 and still warms me to this day. After receiving the bread and cup at the communion rail, we all prayed together:
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things
to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth
and thick darkness the peoples,
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you. (vv. 1-2)
It was the coldest night of the year, that New Year’s Eve in 1968. The thermometer on the light pole on the path down to the barn read 50 below zero by the time we got home from church at 1:00 A.M. Dad insisted that we go into the barn and make sure the drinking cups had not frozen.Most of the cows were lying down in their stalls. The cats were curled up on a pile of straw bales at the end of the driveway. The dog, sensing no need to sound an alarm, yipped lightly and greeted us groggily. The barn was cozy and warm from the body heat of 35 Holsteins and assorted calves and heifers. The drinking cups and the pipes in the milk house were fine. There would be no watery mess for Dad to clean up when he returned to start the milking at 4:30.
It had been Dad’s idea to go to the Watch Night service at the church in Ithaca, Wisconsin, our sister church served by the same pastor, and just eight miles down the road from our own church in Loyd. Mom and little sister hadn’t wanted to go, so it was just Dad and us three boys who piled into the old Rambler. It was after nine o’clock, our regular bedtime if it had been a school night. We headed down State Highway 58 through Loyd, past the one-room schoolhouse where I had been incarcerated on weekdays for eight long years before starting high school at Ithaca in 1965.
It was a still night, and the absence of wind made the bitter cold almost pleasant. The road was clear of ice and snow; the stars were shining bright overhead, and the moon was climbing steadily toward the Big Dipper, its light reflecting so brightly off the drifts in the hayfields in the freezing crisp air that we hardly needed the headlights. The almost full moon looked different that night, or at least we saw it differently. Only eight days before, three earthlings had orbited the moon eight times, a first step in human history before the big step onto the surface of the moon a few months later.
On Christmas Eve, the astronauts Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman took turns reading from the first chapter of Genesis in the stirring poetry of the King James Bible. When Anders proclaimed, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and Borman concluded with “…and God saw that it was good,” the whole world looked up to the heavens with new eyes. We heard their plaintive voices in the barn, echoing all the way from the moon, 238,855 miles to the radio over the calf pen. The memory of it still gives me chills.
A raccoon ran across the road in front of us just as we passed through Neptune, where cars were parked two and three deep around the Black Cat Supper Club. They were having a different kind of Watch Night service, with spirits unfamiliar to us teetotaling Methodists. John and his brother, Charles Wesley, the founders of our movement, were drinkers of malt ale but advised church members to “taste no spirituous liquor.”
We went on past Elephant Trunk Rock and arrived in Ithaca just as the Watch Night vigil was getting started in the church basement, with games and non-spirituous hot chocolate. After several rounds of Chinese checkers and dart ball—followed by snacks of venison sausage, saltine crackers, buttered rye bread, some sweet gherkins pickles, generous slices of award-winning Wisconsin cheddar, leftover Christmas cookies, and fruitcake—we headed upstairs to the sanctuary around 11:40 for the Watch Night Service.
The frigid air seeped through the stained glass windows so that I found myself shivering as we sang “Amazing Grace” and Charles Wesley’s great old gathering hymn, “And Are We Yet Alive?”: “What troubles have we seen, what mighty conflicts past, fightings without, and fears within, since we assembled last!”
I thought of all that had rocked our lives in the turbulent year that was 1968: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which took the lives of over 70,000 Vietnamese and nearly 17,000 Americans, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April, and the violence that followed in cities throughout the country; the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in June, and the police riot in response to the street protests against the Viet Nam War at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. And I said a prayer for my cousins, Verne Long Jr. and Richard Sumwalt, who were among the 500,000 American troops fighting in Viet Nam.
Charles Wesley’s words, written some two hundred years earlier, gave hope and comfort: “Yet out of all the Lord hath brought us by his love; and still he doth his help afford, and hides our life above.”
That Watch Night was the first time I had heard John Wesley’s Covenant Prayer, which he adapted in 1755 from the 1663 version by the Puritan Richard Allen. It warmed my heart on that bitter-cold New Year’s Eve in 1968 and still warms me to this day. After receiving the bread and cup at the communion rail, we all prayed together:
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things
to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.
