The mark of a new year is a curious phenomenon. Our experience of time is seamless, yet by nature we segment it out as past, present, and future. We complain about not having enough time and trying to “carve out” enough time. It is the present, though, that has the privileged point from which we look both into the past and the future. So, it seems that it is true to say that in a sense all we have is the Present.
We “cross” into a New Year and the calendar changes, yet our experience of life has no truly distinguishable “pauses.” Still it is important to visualize or imagine “pauses” so as to celebrate the fact that we have a life experience at all! These “pauses” or “crossings” serve to provide both reflection and direction – what I would like to call Gratitude and Hope. This is the stuff from which real dreams are made!
In the letter to the Galatians (Gal 4:4-7), we hear about the “fullness of time,” as the great gift from God that enables our hearts to cry out ‘Abba, Father!” It is that wonderful privilege granted to all of us that collapses the past and the future into the present “now,” which is none other than the sacred relationship that we have with One Another – a relationship “pregnant” with abundant opportunities for Love, Care, and Mercy!
Could this sacred relationship that is offered to us in God, through one another, be the very same little child that the shepherds hastened to see in Bethlehem in Luke’s Gospel (Lk 2:16-21)? If so, I consider that to be pretty amazing! I like to think that rather than simply confirming what the Angels said to them, the shepherds, in finding the baby Jesus, were transformed by a true experience of the “fullness of time.”
In this transforming experience, the shepherds were given the unearned grace to sense that their lives were completely surrounded and imbued with the sustaining Love of God. All their past and all their future were absolutely dependent upon a doting Father, in whom they could hope and even call “Daddy!” Is this a new way of “seeing?” Could this be another meaning of the Incarnation? “…the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”
In this way, WE can look at the Nativity and this New Year as an invitation to “see” things differently, or perhaps more deeply. This is the ability to dream, and I’m not talking about daydreaming here. This is a dreaming that extends beyond private aspirations and personal goals. It is a “fullness of time” dreaming, replete with transforming gratitude and hope that paves the way for not only a new way of seeing, but a new way of responding – so much more than a simple “resolution.”
The sacred relationship nestled in the straw of a humble manger both blesses and challenges us to live in the present, in the New Presence we hear in the first reading (Nm 6:22-27)…
“The Lord bless you and keep you!
The Lord let his face shine upon you
And be gracious to you!
The Lord look upon you kindly and
Give you Peace!”
Peace
Thomas