GRACE THROUGH TIME 1

AS YEAR SUCCEEDS TO YEAR

Human beings have two contrasting experiences of time, one circular and the other linear.  The scholars tell us that the Greeks were more struck by the first and the Hebrews by the second, though both belong in ordinary experience. The year turns and comes round again as another spring or Advent arrives. The Advent wreath expresses this experience of time. What looks like a decline into darkness will halt, and turn: the circle of evergreen vegetation promises this.

But time is always also linear. If we are tempted to think that this turning of the year is just another circuit of a carousel, then the maturing and ageing body is an undeniable reminder that it is not so. As another Advent comes round, we are a year older and that cannot be reversed. The candles of the Advent wreath speak of this: we move through time towards a destination.

There is hope in both experiences of time and God’s grace reaches us through both. The liturgical feasts of the Bible and the Church are seasonal, linked with the earth’s journey round the sun. So they are springtime festivals and celebrations of harvest and midwinter. But they also celebrate things that happened once and for all in the course of a continuing, narrative history. Hanukkah celebrates at midwinter the re-dedication of the Temple as Christmas celebrates at midwinter the birth of the Sun of Justice.

In one of Jesus’ parables a farmer says ‘give it another year’, referring to a tree not yet bearing fruit (Luke 13:8). The circular experience of time teaches us something about the patience of God. We are given time, again this year, to re-value the mysteries of Advent and appreciate the hope it contains. So it is good that this season has come round for us again.

If we experience God’s patience in the circularity of time, we enter into the freedom of God’s grace through our linear experience of it. ‘There is no need to remember the past’, the Lord says through the prophet Isaiah (43:18). We do not need to return there again and again, but by the grace of God who constantly does new things we can look towards what is to come.

In a poem called Advent, Patrick Kavanagh says that the season’s penances will ‘charm back the luxury of a child’s soul’. He laments lost innocence and what cannot come again. Such nostalgia is another way of being held by the past: beautiful though it seems, it is unreal. By contrast, the theological virtue of hope means we are forever young no matter what our experience, ever growing towards an eternal future, as we become, more and more, God’s children.

The sacrament of reconciliation, fittingly celebrated in Advent, frees us from the circularity of time since it frees us from the past. We do not have to stay there but can enter into the freedom grace brings, absorbing the fruit of experience and continuing forward towards what is to come.

We are pilgrims building a city. We are on our way to another place and another time. But even now we are called to love one another and the whole human race, to make more and more progress in the kind of life God wants for us (1 Thessalonians 3:12; 4:1). By God’s grace we live this life already, as year succeeds to year, and the Lord who is our integrity enables us to build the city that is to come.

This reflection was first published in The Tablet, 28 November 2009, p.11