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| This is NOT the end. |
This summer, when I went on my Grand Tour of Ohio, my car’s odometer clicked over 100,000 miles as I drove west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Well, because the odometer is electronic there was no ‘click’, but the six-digit number appeared for the first time and my nine-plus year-old car became a centenarian of sorts. I took pictures.
That was already five months ago, in those lovely days of summer that unspool at a more leisurely pace and are filled with sweetness. With the autumn, the days come at us faster and faster until in December it seems we stand before a demented pitching machine flinging its projectiles with a mindless fixation on beaning us.
During that same frenzy of demands and diminished days, many of our brothers and sisters did the work of preparing for the great feast that comes ‘in the bleak midwinter.’ Much of the work was unseen, though its results are feasts for the eyes and our ears. Please reflect for a moment on your favorite aspect of these days of Christmas glory, the music, the flowers, the liturgies, the tiny details that manifest hospitality and humanity in this heart of our communion. Then try to find somebody who made it happen and say thank you.
I hope you enjoyed the beautiful Nativity scenes that we have – all three of them. Assembling and staging those is one of the preparations that takes a lot of unseen work but has an outsize reward in enjoyment. Five years back, when we got new figures for both creches, inside the church and outside, some the old figures were still usable, so we hit up Andy Greenleaf (again!) to build a new stable for a display at the back driveway, for all our Woodmoor neighbors. By this fall, those figures had disintegrated further and were no longer usable.
Just before we realized this problem, we had received a memorial gift from Loretta Wells and Regina Smith in honor of their parents, longtime parishioners George and Catherine Gadbois. Their gift mostly covered the cost of a new set of Nativity figures for the back-gate stable. So with the marvel of modern air transport, the (Italian) Holy Family made it to our (Silver Spring) Bethlehem stable. Talk about just-in-time delivery! As you enjoy the beautiful reminder of our Savior’s birth, offer a prayer for the Gadbois family.
Through Advent and Christmas this year, the subject of my letters has been time, how God’s eruption into time and history has changed both, and how our time is marked and measured in the rhythms and rituals of our worship. This week we have another moment of time measurement, the turning of the calendar year.
The New Year holiday has never excited me, nor have its conventional commemorations, midnight parties and various large objects being dropped before the hazy gaze of frozen crowds. The Communist governments, first in Russia then elsewhere as their iron grip took hold, make it the principal festival of the year, supplanting and suppressing Christmas. Those governments have successively failed but nobody lets go easily of a festival, so atheists everywhere have their moment.
Let them have their fun, regardless of whether they advert to the fact that the turning numbers they celebrate mark the Anno Domini, the Year of Our Lord, as we count from the birth of Christ. And the calendar in universal use was promulgated by the Holy See and is named for the successor of Saint Peter who presided over it, Pope Gregory XIII.
We faithful keep the Octave Day of Christmas recalling the Holy Mother of the Divine Son and His naming and circumcision according to the practice of the Jews from whom comes salvation. That is enough for me and rather than watch the clock tick, I go to bed early.
In the cold clear light of another winter day, the so-called ’new’ year is never a big deal, though we will populate its pages with notations of events and accomplishments as well as losses that will define it in our memories. I prefer to refer to it as the Year of Grace, acknowledging our dependence for every detail on the same Divine Providence that gave us so great and so tiny a Savior.
In that way, the opening of a new calendar is rather like the click of the odometer in our car, marking how far we have come, but giving no indication how far we have yet to go.
Monsignor Smith
