Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?
We like to think of time as being something that is more or less constant. Hours, days, months and years seem to pass with seemingly little or no effort on our part, so we tend to assume that they are unchangeable and beyond our control. The truth is, that while days and seasons may come and go without our interference, how we mark time is something that humans are largely responsible for. Many centuries ago, a monk living in Rome decided that he wanted to come up with a better way to calculate the future dates of Easter. The church had been using an old Roman dating system that numbered its years according to the reign of an emperor (e.g., the fourth year in the reign of Augustus). The church had been using a chart to find the date of Easter that dated everything from the reign of the emperor Diocletian, who persecuted the Christians. Since the monk did not want to continue to memorialize a tyrant, he developed a new method of keeping the date based upon his estimation of the year of Christ’s birth. The fact that the majority of the world calls this year the year 2009, is directly the result of this one monk trying to focus our memory on a blessed event, rather than a painful one. There is a little known twist to this story though: the first year did not begin on the 1st of January as we might expect, but on the 25th of March. Why? Because the 25th of March is the Feast of the Annunciation, the date when the church remembers the announcement of the archangel Gabriel to Mary that she was carrying God’s child. The grace of God began, according to this monk, not when Christ was born, nor at the Resurrection, but the moment the seed was planted, thus the first year of grace began, not when the benefits could be seen and realized, but when the change was started. We humans are an impatient lot by nature: whether we are talking about the government’s economic stimulus plan or our hospital’s plan to improve quality and put patients first, in either case we want to see the benefits of our actions right away. We too often are more concerned with outcomes than with the process used to achieve them. A wise doctor once wrote that “only bad things happen quickly.” Well, perhaps not only bad things happen quickly, but looking back at how quickly our country’s economic situation changed and looking forward to how long it is likely to take us to recover, we can see the doctor’s point: good things frequently involve a process and usually take time. Christians frequently think of the Incarnation as something that takes place on Christmas Eve, but the truth is that Christ’s birth, just like any other birth, was a process that took nine months. We are used to looking for God on occasions like Christmas and Easter, those times where we can point specifically to what God has done, but the message Mary received was quite different: “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” The Lord was with Mary at the very beginning of the process, when she could not have been sure of the outcome or what this would mean for her life. God is with us when change begins, not just when we can see its blessings. One of the central themes we can see running throughout the Judeo-Christian scriptures is that we are results-oriented people trying to worship a process-oriented God. And yet, that one monk living in Rome so many centuries ago was able to see that God was with us at the very beginning of change. That one instant when something new was begun was so important that he felt that all time should begin from that point. Eventually January went back to being the first month of the year, but we still maintain this monk’s numbering system. Whether we are worried about the economy, our hospital, or our personal lives, may the greetings of the angel: “the Lord is with you” be a reminder to us that God is with us through the pains of the process and may we also take to heart the angel’s second message: “do not be afraid.”
Blessings,
Fr. Kevin
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