Coffee with Sister Vassa

 

THE LIGHT OF HUMAN BEINGS

There’s so much to write about today: It’s New Year’s Day; it’s also the NC (meaning New Calendar and not North Carolina, just so you know)-feasts of The Circumcision of the Lord and St. Basil the Great; it’s the OC day before the Forefeast of Nativity and Holy Martyr Bonifatius; and it’s a Wednesday. All faith-invigorating topics, particularly on New Year’s Day. But I’ll reflect just on the faith-inspiring coincidence that we are beginning this year on a Wednesday, called “the fourth day” in Hebrew and Greek, which signifies the Fourth Day of creation, when God created and put into motion the planets and the stars. He thus formed and put into motion what is known as “time.” And “God saw that it was good.” 

The forward motion of time, which we celebrate on New Year’s, was “good” in God’s eyes from the beginning. His only-begotten Son reaffirmed this goodness of our time, by stepping into it; by becoming One of us via a Virgin Birth, and walking through it His way, the Way of the Cross. We celebrate both these central mysteries of Christianity every Wednesday, which in our Byzantine liturgical tradition is the day of the Cross and of the Theotokos, with the liturgical hymns thematizing specifically the “stavro-theotokial” topic of her standing next to the Cross. We thus celebrate every Wednesday the “goodness” of God-given time in light of the Cross, and in light of the reality of all of us, as the Mother-Church (signified by the Mother of God), standing near the Cross and participating in her lament. It is a lament that is always leading us to the joy of new life, as the Cross leads to Resurrection. Christ Himself consoles us from His Cross, as in the hymn we chant on Holy Saturday: “Do not lament me, O Mother…, for I shall rise…” I’m reminded also of Bob Dylan’s prophetic song, “It’s alright, Ma, I’m only dying…”

We’re not closing our eyes to the dark reality of Christ being crucified in our world, also in our time, as we stay close by the side of His Cross. But “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it,” (Jn 1:5) is the Great Fact in this human-divine drama, in which we are called to be receiving and emanating this invincible Light. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of human beings.” (Jn 1:4) Let me not miss out on shining the Light onto the darkness today, is my New Years Day resolution (because New Year’s resolutions for the whole year don’t work for me). Thank You, God. Let there be light!

Happy New Year, dear Friends!

Do You Celebrate the (Civil) New Year?

Image source: goodfreephotos.com

 Dear Parish Faithful,

Do You Celebrate the (Civil) New Year?

Most of us certainly do, so by anticipation, I hope and pray for a blessed upcoming year of 2025 for one and all in our parish. Personally, I prefer looking forward to a blessed New Year more than a happy New Year. What, by the way, would a "happy" new year look like? I assume something like: Everything works out for us as we hope it all will. Well there is always a "reality check" on such wishes, so whatever may be in store for us (a "cross?") we hope and pray that "God is with us" in all circumstances of our life. 

Be that as it may, I would suggest that if you are intent upon greeting the New Year with some form of celebration/party/social gathering; the place to begin is in the Church through acknowledging God first and foremost, as the Source of any anticipated "happiness" if not actually "blessings" for 2025. The possibility is there in that this evening, we will celebrate Great Vespers at 7:00 p.m. (The actual ecclesial commemorations on January 1 are the Circumcision of the Lord; and the feast day of St. Basil the Great). And tomorrow morning, we will celebrate the Divine Liturgy at 9:30 a.m. So, we can begin with God, and then carry on from there. 

Or, to use an expression that is probably a regular part of our vocabulary and approach to life, we can think in terms of our priorities. As in: Just where do I begin, when I establish life-affecting priorities and goals? Is the Lord Jesus Christ the "one thing needful" (highest priority) in my life? If not, then what is ...?

Regardless of what is awaiting us in 2025 - known "in advance" only to God - we can use the New Year as the beginning of both a personal and familial renewal. There are "resolutions" and then there is "repentance." The cliche has it that resolutions are made only to be broken, but that is not necessarily true. With effort and the grace of God, we can turn those resolutions into permanent changes in our way of life, the implication from a resolution being that we very much need the change - overcoming "bad habits" and creating "good habits" in their place. Repentance is not only transforming "passions" into "virtues" - the language of the Church and the saints for bad and good habits - but of re-centering our "worldview" on the Holy Trinity, to borrow a phrase from Met. Kallistos Ware. If we take our "life in Christ" seriously, also meaning our life in the grace-filled atmosphere of the Church, then this is all quite possible; for what is impossible on the human level is possible with God, as taught by our Lord.

Resolutions or Repentance?

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

According to the civil calendar, we begin the year of our Lord (Anno Domini) 2022, on January 1. The year of 2022 is based upon the calculations of a medieval monk who, in attempting to ascertain the exact date of the birth of Christ, missed the year 0 by only a few years. According to contemporary scholars, Jesus was actually born between what we consider to be 6 – 4 B. C. These were the last years of Herod the Great, for according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus was born toward the very end of Herod’s long reign (37 – 4 B.C.). Christians therefore divide the linear stretch of historical time between the era before the Incarnation; and the era after the Incarnation and the advent of the Son of God into our space-time world.

In other words, the years before the Incarnation are treated as something of a “countdown” to the time-altering event of the Incarnation; and the years since are counted forward as we move toward the end of history and the coming Kingdom of God. By entering the world, Christ has transformed the meaning and goal of historical time.

Recently, there has been a scholarly shift away from this openly Christian approach to history, as the more traditional designations of B.C. and A.D. have been replaced by the more neutral and “ecumenically sensitive” designations of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), and C.E. (Common Era). Understanding and interpreting history from a decidedly Christian perspective, I would still argue in favor of the more traditional B.C. and A.D.

Although an issue of more than passing interest, that discussion may appear somewhat academic in comparison to the pressing issues of our daily lives as they continue to unfold now in 2022. We will exchange our conventional greetings of “Happy New Year” probably more than once in the next few days. 

Under closer inspection, there remains something vague about that expression, and perhaps that is for the better. Do we wish for the other person – as well as for ourselves – that nothing will go (terribly) wrong in the unknown future of the new year? More positively, do we wish that all of our desires and wishes for our lives will be fulfilled in this new year? Or, are we wishing a successful year of the perpetual pursuit of “happiness” (whatever that means) for ourselves and for our friends? At that point we just may be reaching beyond the restrictive boundaries of reality. As Tevye the Dairyman once said: “The more man plans, the harder God laughs.” 

Perhaps the more realistic approach would be to give and receive our “Happy New Year” greetings as neighborly acknowledgement that we are “all in this together,” and that we need to mutually encourage and support one another.

We also approach the New Year as a time to commit ourselves to those annual “resolutions” that we realize will make our lives more wholesome, safe, sound, or even sane - if only we can sustain them. A resolution is to dig deep inside and find the resolve necessary to break through those (bad) habits or patterns of living that undermine either our effectiveness in daily life; jeopardize our relationships with our loved ones, our friends and our neighbors; or seriously threaten to make us less human than we can and should be. 

We know that we should eat less, swear less, lust less, get angry less, surf the computer less, play on our iPhones less, watch TV less and so on. We further know that we need more patience, more self-discipline, more graceful language, more attention to the needs of others, more “quality time” with our families and friends, more forgiving, more loving and so on. We know, therefore, that we need to change, and we intuitively realize how difficult this is. Bad habits are hard to break. Therefore, we need this annual opportunity of a new beginning and our New Year resolutions to give us a “fighting chance” to actually change.

As a 'holiday' is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of a 'holy day', so a 'resolution' is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of 'repentance'.

 

We may joke about how quickly we break our resolutions, but beneath the surface of that joking (which covers up our disappointments and rationalizations) we are acknowledging, once again, the struggle of moving beyond and replacing our vices with virtues. May God grant everyone the resolve to maintain these resolutions with care and consistency.

And yet I believe that we can profoundly deepen our experience of the above. For, as a “holiday” is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of a “holy day,” so a resolution is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of personal repentance. To repent (Gk. metanoia) is to have a “change of mind,” together with a corresponding change in the manner of our living and a re-direction of our lives toward God. The New Year’s resolution of our secularized culture may be a persistent reminder — or the remainder of — a lost Christian worldview that realized the importance of repentance. “There is something rotten in Denmark,” and an entire industry of self-help and self-reliance therapies — totally divorced from a theistic context — is an open acknowledgement of that reality regardless of how distant it may now be from its religious expression. As members of the Body of Christ living within the grace-filled atmosphere of the Church, we can, in turn, incorporate our resolutions within the ongoing process of repentance, which is nothing less than our vocation as human beings: “God requires us to go on repenting until our last breath” (St. Isaias of Sketis). Or, as St. Isaac of Syria teaches: “This life has been given you for repentance. Do not waste it on other things.”

Summarizing and synthesizing the Church’s traditional teaching about repentance, Archbishop Kallistos Ware has formulated a wonderfully open-ended expression of repentance that is both helpful and hopeful:

Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means not self-pity or remorse but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look not backward with regret but forward with hope – not downwards at our own shortcomings but upward at God’s love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life. ( The Orthodox Way, p. 113-114)

Hard not to be inspired by such an expressive passage! In the Service of Prayer for the (Civil) New Year, we incorporate into the litanies of the service some of the following special petitions. Thus, in the language of the Church, these petitions served as an ecclesial form of the resolutions we make to break through some of our dehumanizing behavior; as well as a plea to God to strengthen our better inclinations: 

That He will drive away from us all soul-corrupting passions and corrupting habits, and that He will plant in our hearts His divine fear, unto the fulfillment of His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will renew a right spirit within us, and strengthen us in the Orthodox Faith, and cause us to make haste in the performance of good deeds and the Fulfillment of all His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will bless the beginning and continuance of this year with the grace of His love for mankind, and will grant unto us peaceful times, favorable weather and a sinless life in health and abundance, let us pray to the Lord.

 

If you resolve to seek and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind … and your neighbor as yourself” (MATT. 22:37-38), then I believe that this new year may not be perpetually “happy,” but that it will truly blessed.

Resolutions or Repentance?

 
Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,



According to the civil calendar, we begin the year of our Lord (Anno Domini) 2021, on January 1. The year of 2021 is based upon the calculations of a medieval monk who, in attempting to ascertain the exact date of the birth of Christ, missed the year 0 by only a few years. According to contemporary scholars, Jesus was actually born between what we consider to be 6 – 4 B. C. These were the last years of Herod the Great, for according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus was born toward the very end of Herod’s long reign (37 – 4 B.C.). Christians therefore divide the linear stretch of historical time between the era before the Incarnation; and the era after the Incarnation and the advent of the Son of God into our space-time world. 

In other words, the years before the Incarnation are treated as something of a “countdown” to the time-altering event of the Incarnation; and the years since are counted forward as we move toward the end of history and the coming Kingdom of God. By entering the world, Christ has transformed the meaning and goal of historical time.

Recently, there has been a scholarly shift away from this openly Christian approach to history, as the more traditional designations of B.C. and A.D. have been replaced by the more neutral and “ecumenically sensitive” designations of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), and C.E. (Common Era). Understanding and interpreting history from a decidedly Christian perspective, I would still argue in favor of the more traditional B.C. and A.D.

Although an issue of more than passing interest, that discussion may appear somewhat academic in comparison to the pressing issues of our daily lives as they continue to unfold now in 2021. We will  exchange our conventional greetings of “Happy New Year” probably more than once in the next few days. Under closer inspection, there remains something vague about that expression, and perhaps that is for the better. Do we wish for the other person – as well as for ourselves – that nothing will go (terribly) wrong in the unknown future of the new year? More positively, do we wish that all of our desires and wishes for our lives will be fulfilled in this new year? Or, are we wishing a successful year of the perpetual pursuit of “happiness” (whatever that means) for ourselves and for our friends? How did that all work out in 2020? At that point we just may be reaching beyond the restrictive boundaries of reality. As Tevye the Dairyman once said: “The more man plans, the harder God laughs.” 

Perhaps the more realistic approach would be to give and receive our “Happy New Year” greetings as neighborly acknowledgement that we are “all in this together,” and that we need to mutually encourage and support one another. When has that been more imperative than precisely in the harrowing year that we have just completed?

We also approach the New Year as a time to commit ourselves to those annual “resolutions” that we realize will make our lives more wholesome, safe, sound, or even sane - if only we can sustain them. A resolution is to dig deep inside and find the resolve necessary to break through those (bad) habits or patterns of living that undermine either our effectiveness in daily life; jeopardize our relationships with our loved ones, our friends and our neighbors; or seriously threaten to make us less human than we can and should be.

We know that we should eat less, swear less, lust less, get angry less, surf the computer less, play on our iPhones less, watch TV less and so on. We further know that we need more patience, more self-discipline, more graceful language, more attention to the needs of others, more “quality time” with our families and friends, more forgiving, more loving and so on. We know, therefore, that we need to change, and we intuitively realize how difficult this is. Bad habits are hard to break. Therefore, we need this annual opportunity of a new beginning and our New Year resolutions to give us a “fighting chance” to actually change. 

We may joke about how quickly we break our resolutions, but beneath the surface of that joking (which covers up our disappointments and rationalizations) we are acknowledging, once again, the struggle of moving beyond and replacing our vices with virtues. May God grant everyone the resolve to maintain these resolutions with care and consistency.

And yet I believe that we can profoundly deepen our experience of the above. For, as a “holiday” is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of a “holy day;” so a resolution is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of personal repentance. To repent (Gk. metanoia) is to have a “change of mind,” together with a corresponding change in the manner of our living and a re-direction of our lives toward God. The New Year’s resolution of our secularized culture may be a persistent reminder — or the remainder of — a lost Christian worldview that realized the importance of repentance. “There is something rotten in Denmark,” and an entire industry of self-help and self-reliance therapies — totally divorced from a theistic context — is an open acknowledgement of that reality regardless of how distant it may now be from its religious expression. As members of the Body of Christ living within the grace-filled atmosphere of the Church, we can, in turn, incorporate our resolutions within the ongoing process of repentance, which is nothing less than our vocation as human beings: “God requires us to go on repenting until our last breath” (St. Isaias of Sketis). Or, as St. Isaac of Syria teaches: “This life has been given you for repentance. Do not waste it on other things.”

Summarizing and synthesizing the Church’s traditional teaching about repentance, Archbishop Kallistos Ware has formulated a wonderfully open-ended expression of repentance that is both helpful and hopeful:

"Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means not self-pity or remorse but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look not backward with regret but forward with hope – not downwards at our own shortcomings but upward at God’s love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life."  (The Orthodox Way, p. 113-114)

Hard not to be inspired by such an expressive passage! In the Service of Prayer for the (Civil) New Year, we incorporate into the litanies of the service some of the following special petitions . Thus, in the language of the Church, these petitions served as an ecclesial form of the resolutions we make to break through some of our dehumanizing behavior; as well as a plea to God to strengthen our better inclinations:

That He will drive away from us all soul-corrupting passions and corrupting habits, and that He will plant in our hearts His divine fear, unto the fulfillment of His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will renew a right spirit within us, and strengthen us in the Orthodox Faith, and cause us to make haste in the performance of good deeds and the Fulfillment of all His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will bless the beginning and continuance of this year with the grace of His of His love for mankind, and will grant unto us peaceful times, favorable weather and a sinless life in health and abundance, let us pray to the Lord.

If you resolve to seek and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind … and your neighbor as yourself” (MATT. 22:37-38), then I believe that this new year may not be perpetually “happy,” but that it will truly blessed.

 

Petitions for a blessed New Year

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

"For I am sure that neither death; nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Rom. 8:38-39)

To follow up on the recent meditation, 'Resolutions or Repentance', I would simply like to point out some key features of the petitions that we recently prayed for a blessed New Year. Specifically, I would like to comment on how we address God in these petitions, for it reveals how we understand, approach, pray to and praise the God we believe in. And here we keep in mind the words of St. Gregory the Theologian: "When I say God, I mean the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

I shared a few of these specially-created petitions in the last meditation, but what stood out for me this year as I chanted them in the service, are the various titles that we ascribe to God in the process. Basically, it proves to be a "variation on a theme." And the theme is: God is love (I Jn. 4:8). As I usually add when I remind us of this most basic of all truths, is that the expression — "God is love" — is not be confused in any way with a kind of religious sentimentalism. The Cross — "You were bought with a price" (I Cor. 6:20) — will always liberate us from any such sentimentalizing of the Gospel.

Be that as it may, in the Augmented Litany for A Prayer Service for the New Year, there are seven of these unique petitions that stand out. They are longer than usual and they cover our prayer for the avoidance of "calamities;" the appeasing of "enmity, discord and civil strife;" for forgiveness of our "innumerable transgressions;" the continued need of "the warmth of the sun;" for strengthening of "Thy Holy Church;" a plea to "root out and extinguish every blasphemous impiety;" and deliverance from "famine, destruction ... the invasion of enemies and civil war ... and every death bearing wound."

This is a list that emphasizes the fragility of our lives and the unpredictability of unforeseen events that threaten the peace of our lives. I would simply guess that these petitions originated in the (medieval) world of Byzantium, a world in which there was a more direct encounter with the realities of the natural world, the havoc of bad weather, lack of medical care and/or an invasion from hostile forces. In our minds, this is a realism that perhaps shades toward pessimism. Or at least for those of us in a world in which taking refuge in technology, medicine or the protection of the law, seems natural, and thus able to relieve of some of the basic problems facing human beings not that long ago; but which may have been quite remote in a large swath of the Christianized Eastern Roman Empire of the past.

I am not saying that these petitions are "dated" and therefore no longer relevant to our current situation. In a fallen world, human nature continues to be what it has always been, and "there is nothing new under the sun" as the Scriptures remind us. "Calamities" may take on a new form in our contemporary world, but we continue to feel uneasy in the face of the unpredictable: the next school/mall/church/synagogue shooting; a rampaging tornado or hurricane; the outbreak of a new disease; or a "cardiac episode." Our contemporary list does not seem a great deal less hazardous, when it gets right down to it. Thus, throughout human history, whether in the pre-modern, modern or post-modern worlds of our creation, "calamities" have always occurred and continue unabated.

To return to my original point, however, I am struck at how these lengthy petitions end in addressing God. In succession, we pray to God in the following manner, as: "O All-gracious Lord;" "O Tenderly-merciful Lord;" "O All-compassionate Lord;" "O Almighty Master;" "O All-powerful Lord;" and "O Tenderly-compassionate Lord." God's majesty and power are emphasized, but God's mercy compassion predominate. (Not that there is a real conflict between God's omnipotence and mercy). 

Thus, we are not in the hands of an angry God, but of those of a loving God. We should recall that for St. Irenaeus of Lyons, the "two hands of God" are the Son and the Holy Spirit. (That image of an "angry God" that Christians have embraced and promoted for centuries has been profoundly unfortunate, to put it mildly.) We humbly acknowledge in these same petitions that we are "unprofitable servants" (if you are ready to argue against that claim, I would like to hear what you have to say).

We further acknowledge that we are sinners in desperate need of grace and mercy (how refreshing to not feel compelled by a need for self-validation, or the maintenance of a particular white-washed image to others, to defensively claim whenever we do something wrong that I am really a "nice person!"). There is nothing abject about such acknowledgment, but a sobering realism that we, too, are subject to the passions and sinful distortions - or simply unavoidable circumstances - that are both "out there" and "within us." As St. Peter wrote to fellow Christians: "Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (I Pet. 5:8). The Gospel tells us that God desires to save us from all of this - not to punish us.

The tension may arise when we think deeply on the seeming contradiction between the endless "calamities" that expose us to danger, and the assurance that we are the servants of a loving and graceful God who numbers the hairs on our head according to Christ. That is the tension I perceive within these petitions I keep referring to: a litany of "bad things" closing with the praise of a "tenderly-compassionate God."

Is there a disconnect in all of this that we piously avoid questioning? Why doesn't God solve all of these tensions on our behalf, if he indeed loves us? In our limited understanding, no one has been able to answer those questions when put in that form. As it is, I rather doubt that we will ever solve the haunting questions faced by Job, and cast today rather superficially as: "why do bad things happen to good people?" Yet, once our faith matures to the point where we abandon the image of God as cosmic magician - if not butler - who is supposed to guarantee us a long and prosperous life where nothing serious or life-threatening ever happens - yet, even so, we will still die!- then we can face "calamities" with a hopeful realism that we are always in the hands of a merciful and loving God who desires our salvation.

Jesus teaches us to trust God - not blindly but, again, hopefully with a mature faith. Or, in the incomparable words of the Apostle Paul: "Who shall separate us from the low of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through hum who loved us" (Rom. 8:35,37).  I, for one, am confident that the prayers of the Church in the form of these petitions for a blessed New Year have got it right.

Through faith, intuitively, by inner perception, we know that the God who has revealed Himself in Christ is the "All-compassionate Lord."

Resolutions or Repentance?

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

According to the civil calendar, we begin the year of our Lord (Anno Domini) 2020, on January 1. The year of 2020 is based upon the calculations of a medieval monk who, in attempting to ascertain the exact date of the birth of Christ, missed the year 0 by only a few years. According to contemporary scholars, Jesus was actually born between what we consider to be 6 – 4 B. C. These were the last years of Herod the Great, for according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus was born toward the very end of Herod’s long reign (37 – 4 B.C.). Christians therefore divide the linear stretch of historical time between the era before the Incarnation; and the era after the Incarnation and the advent of the Son of God into our space-time world. 

In other words, the years before the Incarnation are treated as something of a “countdown” to the time-altering event of the Incarnation; and the years since are counted forward as we move toward the end of history and the coming Kingdom of God. By entering the world, Christ has transformed the meaning and goal of historical time.

Recently, there has been a scholarly shift away from this openly Christian approach to history, as the more traditional designations of B.C. and A.D. have been replaced by the more neutral and “ecumenically sensitive” designations of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), and C.E. (Common Era). Understanding and interpreting history from a decidedly Christian perspective, I would still argue in favor of the more traditional B.C. and A.D.

Although an issue of more than passing interest, that discussion may appear somewhat academic in comparison to the pressing issues of our daily lives as they continue to unfold now in 2020. We will  exchange our conventional greetings of “Happy New Year” probably more than once in the next few days. 

Under closer inspection, there remains something vague about that expression, and perhaps that is for the better. Do we wish for the other person – as well as for ourselves – that nothing will go (terribly) wrong in the unknown future of the new year? More positively, do we wish that all of our desires and wishes for our lives will be fulfilled in this new year? Or, are we wishing a successful year of the perpetual pursuit of “happiness” (whatever that means) for ourselves and for our friends? At that point we just may be reaching beyond the restrictive boundaries of reality. As Tevye the Dairyman once said: “The more man plans, the harder God laughs.” 

Perhaps the more realistic approach would be to give and receive our “Happy New Year” greetings as neighborly acknowledgement that we are “all in this together,” and that we need to mutually encourage and support one another.

We also approach the New Year as a time to commit ourselves to those annual “resolutions” that we realize will make our lives more wholesome, safe, sound, or even sane - if only we can sustain them. A resolution is to dig deep inside and find the resolve necessary to break through those (bad) habits or patterns of living that undermine either our effectiveness in daily life; jeopardize our relationships with our loved ones, our friends and our neighbors; or seriously threaten to make us less human than we can and should be. 

We know that we should eat less, swear less, lust less, get angry less, surf the computer less, play on our iPhones less, watch TV less and so on. We further know that we need more patience, more self-discipline, more graceful language, more attention to the needs of others, more “quality time” with our families and friends, more forgiving, more loving and so on. We know, therefore, that we need to change, and we intuitively realize how difficult this is. Bad habits are hard to break. Therefore, we need this annual opportunity of a new beginning and our New Year resolutions to give us a “fighting chance” to actually change. 

 

 

As a 'holiday' is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of a 'holy day', so a 'resolution' is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of 'repentance'.

 

We may joke about how quickly we break our resolutions, but beneath the surface of that joking (which covers up our disappointments and rationalizations) we are acknowledging, once again, the struggle of moving beyond and replacing our vices with virtues. May God grant everyone the resolve to maintain these resolutions with care and consistency.

And yet I believe that we can profoundly deepen our experience of the above. For, as a “holiday” is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of a “holy day,” so a resolution is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of personal repentance. To repent (Gk. metanoia) is to have a “change of mind,” together with a corresponding change in the manner of our living and a re-direction of our lives toward God. The New Year’s resolution of our secularized culture may be a persistent reminder — or the remainder of — a lost Christian worldview that realized the importance of repentance. “There is something rotten in Denmark,” and an entire industry of self-help and self-reliance therapies — totally divorced from a theistic context — is an open acknowledgement of that reality regardless of how distant it may now be from its religious expression. As members of the Body of Christ living within the grace-filled atmosphere of the Church, we can, in turn, incorporate our resolutions within the ongoing process of repentance, which is nothing less than our vocation as human beings: “God requires us to go on repenting until our last breath” (St. Isaias of Sketis). Or, as St. Isaac of Syria teaches: “This life has been given you for repentance. Do not waste it on other things.”

Summarizing and synthesizing the Church’s traditional teaching about repentance, Archbishop Kallistos Ware has formulated a wonderfully open-ended expression of repentance that is both helpful and hopeful:

 

Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means not self-pity or remorse but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look not backward with regret but forward with hope – not downwards at our own shortcomings but upward at God’s love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life.  (The Orthodox Way, p. 113-114)

 

Hard not to be inspired by such an expressive passage! In the Service of Prayer for the (Civil) New Year, we incorporate into the litanies of the service some of the following special petitions. Thus, in the language of the Church, these petitions served as an ecclesial form of the resolutions we make to break through some of our dehumanizing behavior; as well as a plea to God to strengthen our better inclinations:

 

That He will drive away from us all soul-corrupting passions and corrupting habits, and that He will plant in our hearts His divine fear, unto the fulfillment of His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will renew a right spirit within us, and strengthen us in the Orthodox Faith, and cause us to make haste in the performance of good deeds and the Fulfillment of all His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will bless the beginning and continuance of this year with the grace of His love for mankind, and will grant unto us peaceful times, favorable weather and a sinless life in health and abundance, let us pray to the Lord.

 

If you resolve to seek and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind … and your neighbor as yourself” (MATT. 22:37-38), then I believe that this new year may not be perpetually “happy,” but that it will truly blessed.

Metropolitan Tikhon: On the Church New Year and the Day of Prayer for All Creation

Dear Parish Faithful,

Please read His Beatitude's pastoral letter carefully on the Church New Year and the theme of creation. On Tuesday evening, September 3, we will have a service, entitled "Vespers for the Environment." I believe - but am not certain - that this service comes from the ecumenical patriarchate. It reflects a very Orthodox appreciation for the world in which we live, and our vocation to be good stewards of this world given to us by God as a gift.

Fr. Steven

• Read and download Metropolitan Tikhon's message in PDF format. Original posting here.

• Explore numerous resources for youth, teens, families, and parishes on Caring for God's Creation on this special page on the OCA website.

* * *

The Beginning of the Ecclesiastical New Year 2019 

Archpastoral Message of His Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon

on the Beginning of the Ecclesiastical Year,

the Day of Prayer for Creation

September 1, 2019

To the Venerable Hierarchs, Clergy, Monastics, and Faithful of the Orthodox Church in America,

O timeless Word and Son without beginning, united with the Holy Spirit, Co-maker of all and Co-creator of all things visible and invisible: bless the beginning of this year; bring peace to Thine Orthodox people, through the prayers of the Theotokos and all the saints.

Doxastichon for the Indiction at Lord I Call.

On this day, the Ecclesiastical New Year, the church calls us to contemplate and meditate upon our Creator and His Creation. This first day of the New Year not only marks a renewal of the liturgical cycle, but, as the beginning of the year, it draws our attention to the beginning of all and to God who has no beginning. As such, we are given the opportunity to offer prayers for the preservation of the earth, for the welfare of us who inhabit it, who are part of it, and who crown it, and for God to grant us the wisdom and grace to be good and faithful stewards of this earth, the Lord’s creation, given to us freely and always imparting more gifts for our nourishment, benefit, and life.

It is easy to take creation for granted, to see the world around us as comprising inanimate objects and dumb beasts, servants to our purpose and delight, or obstacles in our way. Indeed, in the beginning God placed human beings at the head of creation, creating us in His image and likeness to have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26) Yet, as with our Lord and his Kingship over us, we are not to dominate nature, but humbly commune with it in a relationship of love, of care, and of stewardship.

While Genesis shows that the world was created for the service of humanity, the Psalmist so eloquently puts into divinely-inspired words the ultimate, higher purpose of God’s creation:

Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise Him in the highest… Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy winds fulfilling his command. Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars, beasts of the earth and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds. Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth, young men and maidens, old men and children! (Ps. 148:1, 7-12)

“Let them praise the name of the Lord!” the Psalmist exclaims. We are of creation, and ultimately ought to be of one mind and purpose with all created things, praising the Lord. While creation praises the Lord by its very existence, we offer our praise to the Lord through our stewardship of creation and created things themselves, a reality revealed so fully in the Eucharist.

Thus, as we celebrate the beginning of the New Ecclesiastical Year, I exhort you to bear in mind the beginning of the world, and the world itself. Let us give thanks for creation, with the words of the beautiful Akathist “Glory to God for all Things” on our lips. Let us contemplate the great mystery of creation, which offers itself for our nourishment and earthly life. Likewise, let us further meditate upon the culmination of creation: Jesus Christ, our Lord, offering his very body and blood, his substance and life, upon the Cross for our life. Let us join the earth, wood and water, sky and stone, praising and worshipping the Lord, the Giver and Creator of Life. May our Lord and Creator inspire us, that we may heal our state of enmity with nature wrought by sin (Gen. 3:15-19), that we may strive for the preservation and renewal of the world, and that we might sing His praises with the earth and all that is in it as good stewards of His creation.

With paternal love and blessings,

+TIKHON
Archbishop of Washington
Metropolitan of All America and Canada

Resolutions or Repentance?

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

According to the civil calendar, we begin the year of our Lord (Anno Domini) 2019, on January 1. The year of 2019 is based upon the calculations of a medieval monk who, in attempting to ascertain the exact date of the birth of Christ, missed the year 0 by only a few years. According to contemporary scholars, Jesus was actually born between what we consider to be 6 – 4 B. C. These were the last years of Herod the Great, for according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus was born toward the very end of Herod’s long reign (37 – 4 B.C.). Christians therefore divide the linear stretch of historical time between the era before the Incarnation; and the era after the Incarnation and the advent of the Son of God into our space-time world. 

In other words, the years before the Incarnation are treated as something of a “countdown” to the time-altering event of the Incarnation; and the years since are counted forward as we move toward the end of history and the coming Kingdom of God. By entering the world, Christ has transformed the meaning and goal of historical time.

Recently, there has been a scholarly shift away from this openly Christian approach to history, as the more traditional designations of B.C. and A.D. have been replaced by the more neutral and “ecumenically sensitive” designations of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), and C.E. (Common Era). Understanding and interpreting history from a decidedly Christian perspective, I would still argue in favor of the more traditional B.C. and A.D.

Although an issue of more than passing interest, that discussion may appear somewhat academic in comparison to the pressing issues of our daily lives as they continue to unfold now in 2019. We will  exchange our conventional greetings of “Happy New Year” probably more than once in the next few days. 

Under closer inspection, there remains something vague about that expression, and perhaps that is for the better. Do we wish for the other person – as well as for ourselves – that nothing will go (terribly) wrong in the unknown future of the new year? More positively, do we wish that all of our desires and wishes for our lives will be fulfilled in this new year? Or, are we wishing a successful year of the perpetual pursuit of “happiness” (whatever that means) for ourselves and for our friends? At that point we just may be reaching beyond the restrictive boundaries of reality. As Tevye the Dairyman once said: “The more man plans, the harder God laughs.” 

Perhaps the more realistic approach would be to give and receive our “Happy New Year” greetings as neighborly acknowledgement that we are “all in this together,” and that we need to mutually encourage and support one another.

We also approach the New Year as a time to commit ourselves to those annual “resolutions” that we realize will make our lives more wholesome, safe, sound, or even sane - if only we can sustain them. A resolution is to dig deep inside and find the resolve necessary to break through those (bad) habits or patterns of living that undermine either our effectiveness in daily life; jeopardize our relationships with our loved ones, our friends and our neighbors; or seriously threaten to make us less human than we can and should be. 

We know that we should eat less, swear less, lust less, get angry less, surf the computer less, play on our iPhones less, watch TV less and so on. We further know that we need more patience, more self-discipline, more graceful language, more attention to the needs of others, more “quality time” with our families and friends, more forgiving, more loving and so on. We know, therefore, that we need to change, and we intuitively realize how difficult this is. Bad habits are hard to break. Therefore, we need this annual opportunity of a new beginning and our New Year resolutions to give us a “fighting chance” to actually change. 

We may joke about how quickly we break our resolutions, but beneath the surface of that joking (which covers up our disappointments and rationalizations) we are acknowledging, once again, the struggle of moving beyond and replacing our vices with virtues. May God grant everyone the resolve to maintain these resolutions with care and consistency.

And yet I believe that we can profoundly deepen our experience of the above. For, as a “holiday” is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of a “holy day;” so a resolution is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of personal repentance. To repent (Gk. metanoia) is to have a “change of mind,” together with a corresponding change in the manner of our living and a re-direction of our lives toward God. The New Year’s resolution of our secularized culture may be a persistent reminder — or the remainder of — a lost Christian worldview that realized the importance of repentance. “There is something rotten in Denmark,” and an entire industry of self-help and self-reliance therapies — totally divorced from a theistic context — is an open acknowledgement of that reality regardless of how distant it may now be from its religious expression. As members of the Body of Christ living within the grace-filled atmosphere of the Church, we can, in turn, incorporate our resolutions within the ongoing process of repentance, which is nothing less than our vocation as human beings: “God requires us to go on repenting until our last breath” (St. Isaias of Sketis). Or, as St. Isaac of Syria teaches: “This life has been given you for repentance. Do not waste it on other things.”

Summarizing and synthesizing the Church’s traditional teaching about repentance, Archbishop Kallistos Ware has formulated a wonderfully open-ended expression of repentance that is both helpful and hopeful:

Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means not self-pity or remorse but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look not backward with regret but forward with hope – not downwards at our own shortcomings but upward at God’s love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life.  (The Orthodox Way, p. 113-114)

Hard not to be inspired by such an expressive passage! In the Service of Prayer for the (Civil) New Year, we incorporate into the litanies of the service some of the following special petitions . Thus, in the language of the Church, these petitions served as an ecclesial form of the resolutions we make to break through some of our dehumanizing behavior; as well as a plea to God to strengthen our better inclinations:

That He will drive away from us all soul-corrupting passions and corrupting habits, and that He will plant in our hearts His divine fear, unto the fulfillment of His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will renew a right spirit within us, and strengthen us in the Orthodox Faith, and cause us to make haste in the performance of good deeds and the Fulfillment of all His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will bless the beginning and continuance of this year with the grace of His of His love for mankind, and will grant unto us peaceful times, favorable weather and a sinless life in health and abundance, let us pray to the Lord.

If you resolve to seek and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind … and your neighbor as yourself” (MATT. 22:37-38), then I believe that this new year may not be perpetually “happy,” but that it will truly blessed.

Nativity Afterfeast and the Week (and Year) Ahead

Dear Parish Faithful,

Afterfeast of the Nativity - This is a somewhat complicated period in terms of how it is approached liturgically.

On the one hand, we have the longest fast-free period in the entire liturgical year, from December 25 - January 4 inclusive. This fast-free period is reflective of the joy that surrounds the Nativity of Christ. That means that the entire week ahead of us is fast-free up to and including Friday.

However, January 5 is "strict fast day" in preparation for Theophany on January 6 (a Sunday this year). So, we have the "twelve days of Christmas" from December 25 - January 5, though the last of these days is a fast day because of the subsequent Theophany.

However, because January 1 is eight days after Nativity, we celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on that day. Jesus submits Himself to the Law and is circumcised in the flesh as a male child of Israel; as well as being given his divinely-directed Name of Jesus on the eighth day. Yet, since this feast takes us to the "next step" in the developing life of Christ, we no longer sing the festal Nativity hymns past December 31.

Therefore, though the Christmas season extends up to Theophany, it is no longer the focus of the Church's liturgy/hymnography once we come to the Circumcision. Hence, today is the last day that we sing the Troparion, "Thy Nativity of Christ ..." As I said, a bit complicated...

Here is a link to a good, short summary of the meaning of the Feast of the Circumcision...

On January 1, we also commemorate St. Basil the Great, truly one of the "greatest" of the Church Fathers. Here is a link to a rather lengthy summary of his extraordinary life - all packed into forty-nine years!

How will we, as a parish, celebrate these two feasts on January 1 (together with the civil New Year)? According to the following schedule:

This evening - Great Vespers at 6:00 p.m.
Tuesday - Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great at 9:30 a.m.

I hope to see many of you at one or both of these services. If the civil New Year is a big celebration for you, then begin with God!

Resolutions or Repentance?

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

According to the civil calendar, we begin the year of our Lord (Anno Domini) 2018, on January 1. The year of 2018 is based upon the calculations of a medieval monk who, in attempting to ascertain the exact date of the birth of Christ, missed the year 0 by only a few years. According to contemporary scholars, Jesus was actually born between what we consider to be 6 – 4 B. C. These were the last years of Herod the Great, for according to the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus was born toward the very end of Herod’s long reign (37 – 4 B.C.). Christians therefore divide the linear stretch of historical time between the era before the Incarnation; and the era after the Incarnation and the advent of the Son of God into our space-time world. 

In other words, the years before the Incarnation are treated as something of a “countdown” to the time-altering event of the Incarnation; and the years since are counted forward as we move toward the end of history and the coming Kingdom of God. By entering the world, Christ has transformed the meaning and goal of historical time.

Recently, there has been a scholarly shift away from this openly Christian approach to history, as the more traditional designations of B.C. and A.D. have been replaced by the more neutral and “ecumenically sensitive” designations of B.C.E. (Before the Common Era), and C.E. (Common Era). Understanding and interpreting history from a decidedly Christian perspective, I would still argue in favor of the more traditional B.C. and A.D.

Although an issue of more than passing interest, that discussion may appear somewhat academic in comparison to the pressing issues of our daily lives as they continue to unfold now in 2018. We will  exchange our conventional greetings of “Happy New Year” probably more than once in the next few days. 

Under closer inspection, there remains something vague about that expression, and perhaps that is for the better. Do we wish for the other person – as well as for ourselves – that nothing will go (terribly) wrong in the unknown future of the new year? More positively, do we wish that all of our desires and wishes for our lives will be fulfilled in this new year? Or, are we wishing a successful year of the perpetual pursuit of “happiness” (whatever that means) for ourselves and for our friends? At that point we just may be reaching beyond the restrictive boundaries of reality. As Tevye the Dairyman once said: “The more man plans, the harder God laughs.” 

Perhaps the more realistic approach would be to give and receive our “Happy New Year” greetings as neighborly acknowledgement that we are “all in this together,” and that we need to mutually encourage and support one another.

We also approach the New Year as a time to commit ourselves to those annual “resolutions” that we realize will make our lives more wholesome, safe, sound, or even sane - if only we can sustain them. A resolution is to dig deep inside and find the resolve necessary to break through those (bad) habits or patterns of living that undermine either our effectiveness in daily life; jeopardize our relationships with our loved ones, our friends and our neighbors; or seriously threaten to make us less human than we can and should be. 

We know that we should eat less, swear less, lust less, get angry less, surf the computer less, play on our iPhones less, watch TV less and so on. We further know that we need more patience, more self-discipline, more graceful language, more attention to the needs of others, more “quality time” with our families and friends, more forgiving, more loving and so on. We know, therefore, that we need to change, and we intuitively realize how difficult this is. Bad habits are hard to break. Therefore, we need this annual opportunity of a new beginning and our New Year resolutions to give us a “fighting chance” to actually change. 

We may joke about how quickly we break our resolutions, but beneath the surface of that joking (which covers up our disappointments and rationalizations) we are acknowledging, once again, the struggle of moving beyond and replacing our vices with virtues. May God grant everyone the resolve to maintain these resolutions with care and consistency.

And yet I believe that we can profoundly deepen our experience of the above. For, as a “holiday” is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of a “holy day;” so a resolution is a more-or-less secular and watered-down version of personal repentance. To repent (Gk. metanoia) is to have a “change of mind,” together with a corresponding change in the manner of our living and a re-direction of our lives toward God. The New Year’s resolution of our secularized culture may be a persistent reminder — or the remainder of — a lost Christian worldview that realized the importance of repentance. “There is something rotten in Denmark,” and an entire industry of self-help and self-reliance therapies — totally divorced from a theistic context — is an open acknowledgement of that reality regardless of how distant it may now be from its religious expression. As members of the Body of Christ living within the grace-filled atmosphere of the Church, we can, in turn, incorporate our resolutions within the ongoing process of repentance, which is nothing less than our vocation as human beings: “God requires us to go on repenting until our last breath” (St. Isaias of Sketis). Or, as St. Isaac of Syria teaches: “This life has been given you for repentance. Do not waste it on other things.”

Summarizing and synthesizing the Church’s traditional teaching about repentance, Archbishop Kallistos Ware has formulated a wonderfully open-ended expression of repentance that is both helpful and hopeful:

Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means not self-pity or remorse but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look not backward with regret but forward with hope – not downwards at our own shortcomings but upward at God’s love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life.  (The Orthodox Way, p. 113-114)

Hard not to be inspired by such an expressive passage! In the Service of Prayer for the (Civil) New Year, we incorporate into the litanies of the service some of the following special petitions . Thus, in the language of the Church, these petitions served as an ecclesial form of the resolutions we make to break through some of our dehumanizing behavior; as well as a plea to God to strengthen our better inclinations:

That He will drive away from us all soul-corrupting passions and corrupting habits, and that He will plant in our hearts His divine fear, unto the fulfillment of His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will renew a right spirit within us, and strengthen us in the Orthodox Faith, and cause us to make haste in the performance of good deeds and the Fulfillment of all His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.

That He will bless the beginning and continuance of this year with the grace of His of His love for mankind, and will grant unto us peaceful times, favorable weather and a sinless life in health and abundance, let us pray to the Lord.

If you resolve to seek and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind … and your neighbor as yourself” (MATT. 22:37-38), then I believe that this new year may not be perpetually “happy,” but that it will truly blessed.

Sanctifying Time

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

In the Service of Prayer for the New Year, we offer the following prayerful petitions to God:

“That He will mercifully accept this present thanksgiving and supplication of us, His unworthy servants, on His most-heavenly Altar, and compassionately have mercy on us, let us pray to the Lord.

“That He will bless the beginning and continuance of this year with the grace of His love for mankind, and will grant unto us peaceful times, favorable weather and a sinless life in health and abundance, let us pray to the Lord.

“That He will drive away from us all soul-corrupting passions and corrupting habits,  and that He will plant in our hearts His divine fear, unto the fulfillment of His statutes, let us pray to the Lord.”

By the grace of God, may it be so!  

These petitions from the Great Litany of this service should at least move us to a deeper level of reflection (and prayer) than that offered in the rather vapid “Happy New Year!”  The New Year, with its unavoidable theme of time, prompted me to go back over an excellent essay by Archbishop Kallistos Ware, titled 'Time:  Prison or Path to Freedom?' (This essay can be found in Vol. 1 of Archbishop Ware’s Collected Works—The Inner Kingdom—published by SVS Press).  This is a rich essay indeed, in which Archbishop Kallistos asks questions and offers insights that are universal in their application.  

“Our experience of time… is deeply ambivalent,” he writes.  “How are we to regard time:  an enemy or friend, as our prison or our path to freedom?  Which aspect do we find predominant in its double-edged impact upon us:  anguish or healing, terror or hope, decay or growth, separation or relationship?” [p. 183].

In other words, is time simply “eating away” at the successive and finite number of moments that comprise our lives, sweeping us along toward death and oblivion, or is there purpose and a transcendent “destination” in this movement?  Anguish or hope do seem to be very honest responses to such polarized possibilities.  And as Archbishop Kallistos suggests, we should use the “time” to think hard on just which direction we are inclined toward with these two poles.

As a Christian and a bishop who combines theological brilliance with a fine pastoral sense, Archbishop Kallistos fills us with a sense of hope as He affirms our faith that Christ is the “Alpha and Omega” of time, as well as the mid-point.  In addition to this fundamental assertion, he has a wonderful section in this essay under the heading “Time as the Freedom to Love.”  I hope that this excerpt of two passages from this section, will convey something of his wonderful insights about the nature of time and our freedom to love.

“It is in the context of freedom and love that the meaning of time can best be appreciated.  Time is part of the “distancing” or ‘contraction’ on God’s side which makes it possible for us humans freely to love.  It is, as it were, the interspace which enables us to move towards God unconstrained and by our voluntary choice.  ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock,’ says Christ; ‘if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him and he with me’ [Revelation 3:20].... 

"Time is the interval between God’s appeal and our answer.  We humans need this interval of time so as freely to love God and one another; without the interval we cannot engage in the dialogue of love….  Time is thus an all-important dimension of our created personhood, the setting that makes it possible for us to choose love.  It is time that allows us to respond to God by our own free content, that enables our love to mature, that permits us to grow in love” [pp. 188-189].

In the fallen world that we occupy, time has become inextricably linked to mortality and death, but it still remains a gift, as do all aspects of God’s creative will, now redeemed by the advent of Christ.  Often, we hear—and may even use—the dreadful phrase “to kill time,” either out of boredom or in waiting for something “important” to happen.  Yet our Christian vocation is to “sanctify time” as our movement toward the Kingdom which has no end.  Every moment counts, because every moment is a gift from God.

Is there a meaningful and worthwhile New Year’s resolution to commit oneself to somewhere in all of this?