You Are The New Day – In Memory of Sarah McCurry, z’l

You are the new day

I will love you more than me and more than yesterday,
If you can but prove to me you are the new day.

Send the sun in time for dawn. Let the birds all hail the morning.
Love of life will urge me say. You are the new day.

When I lay me down at night knowing we must pay.
Thoughts occur that this night might stay yesterday.

Thoughts that we as humans small could slow worlds and end it all,
lie around me where they fall before the new day

One more day when time is running out for everyone.
Like a breath I knew would come I reach for a new day.

Hope is my philosophy. Just needs days in which to be.
Love of life means hope for me — borne on a new day
John David

It will take less than three minutes. Please, before you read this post, listen and look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeuVBc76jas 

Twenty-two years ago, I taught You Are the New Day to my students in Taiwan. My students in Taiwan called me “Teacher.”

“Teacher,” asked Injade, “What do you think is the meaning of life?”

“Laughter,” I said, “Learning. Love.”

“Teacher’s three L’s” they called them for the rest of the year.

My students sang this song at a university awards ceremony. I think they chose this song because they loved me and I loved them.

Twenty-two years ago, Sarah McCurry was about the age of the little girl in the video you have just seen. Sarah was a student of mine at UNC-Charlotte. Every class she took in her Judaic Studies minor she took with me.

She came from difficult circumstances: Deep, pervasive poverty marked her childhood, for one thing. Other things formed and shaped her – but these are things I could not write about.

During her time at UNCC she grew from an awkward teenager into a young woman who combined conviction and self-assurance with a wicked sense of fun. Dry, dark humor was her forte.

Sarah called me almost exactly one year ago. I hadn’t heard from her in a while. It should have been a wonderful surprise. She called from Texas, where she had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of colon cancer. She was just 23.

Sarah died in late January.

She decided against chemotherapy and for natural healing methods. Her disease did not offer her much chance for survival – regardless of any choice she made. But she tried to live her life inside each day. She spoke to me of the healing value of rain. She walked mountains. She read books about angels. She wore a lot of green.

Green, she told me, when I saw her last, is Gabriel’s color. Gabriel was her angel.

After Sarah died, You Are the New Day ran, again and again, through my head. When I went to listen to it again, I discovered that I had, for years, been singing it wrong. I had sung the line “when I lay me down at night knowing we must pay” this way: “When I lay me down at night knowing we must pray.”

After Sarah died I sang, over and over, about lying down to pray. Sarah learned to pray – with me and with others – her last year of life.

She kept telling me what she was learning. Slow down, she’d say. Live the life you have. Stop working so hard. Look around you and know this world.

Send the sun in time for dawn. Let the birds all hail the morning. Love of life will urge me say. You are the new day.

Sarah, I will try to heed you. I will try to hear your song.

You are the new day.

Last year, Sarah gave me permission both to write about her and to use pictures of her. I checked each text with her before posting. Sarah, I hope you approve of this one.