The Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

St Paul's Methodist Church
at Douglass and Bardstown Road

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.

The prelude of Saint John’s gospel was, before the Second Vatican Council, read at every Mass after the Eucharist. It was called the “Last Gospel” although it might as easily have been called the first gospel for it begins in the beginning.

On this last day of the year the Church takes us back to our beginnings, and we remember the Word is God. He has “pitched his tent” among us and become one of our own children.

Today’s first reading also summons the mysterious presence of time, “Children, it is the last hour….”

T.S. Eliot introduced his reflection on time with:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

But our faith teaches us that time is redeemable because God has come to stay with us in time. He lived among us as a man, in a time not so long ago, in a place not very far away. It was a world familiar to us, where people paid taxes, worried over politics, struggled for their daily bread and danced with their neighbors as often as they quarreled with them.

Philosophers and scientists have struggled to understand this fourth dimension called time. David Hawking has said that in the universe he understands every point is the center of the universe, and it has no edges. Every moment too is the beginning and the end of time; and its now is endless. Somehow that makes sense as we finish a year and plunge into another.

The New Testament is steeped in an apocalyptic awareness of time. “Now is the final hour!” Every moment is critical – a crisis! -- and its weight feels both eager and anxious. It is anxious if I am fearful; it is eager if I am ready to listen.

Saint Francis, toward the end of his life, wrote to his friars, “Let us begin again for up until now we have done nothing." 

No one can say, “I have done enough, I have earned my salvation.” Rather I must embrace the present moment and welcome the Holy Spirit who directs my life through each moment of each day. True, I make plans, because planning is what I must do at this moment as the Spirit directs me. And I assess the past -- but not with the authority of a judge for there is only one judge and I am not Him. I assess the past so as to see the present more clearly and plan more carefully.

Traditionally we like to make “New Years Resolutions” on this last day of the year. Hopefully, they will be realistic and optimistic. Hopefully, they will not be much different than the ones we made last year, for we’ve not changed that much since last year.

I hope that I will see beauty in 2011. I think there can be few privileges granted to mortals greater than the contemplation of beauty. I want to see it in the friars with whom I live, and the Veterans I visit in the VA hospital. I want to see the beautiful Holy Spirit clearing my head and my eyes, my ears and my nostril, my tongue and my skin so that I might sense beauty all around me and thoroughly within me.

Life is too short to put off the vision of beauty. Even when I am toiling over a work that cannot be finished today or this year or in one lifespan, I should see the beauty of the labor.

I say should intentionally because I want to do what I should do and I want to be what I should be. I need not be afraid of the shoulds that hang over me continually. They persist like the furies and they get me down at times but they’re part of the eager/anxious human experience. And if human experience was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me. You recall how eager he was: I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

May God bless you today, on this last day of 2010, and throughout this impending 2011. “Let us begin again for up until now we have done nothing."