a circle of prayer: preface: beginning

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time." (t. s. eliot, "little gidding")

the problem and advantage of a circle is that it has no begining, and everywhere is a beginning. this essay on time as revelation and formation has been been begun three times. i began to be reworked, reformed, recreated by observing what is uaually called "the church year" after reading thomas merton's journal the sign of jonas. then i was in william tyndale's words "a lucky fellow" and wandered into an episcopal church and took up the daily office.

like so many new and true believers, i was anxious to share my discoveries. i read everything i could find on the "church year" (some of which are included in the selected bibliography), and soon i was teaching introductions to the year and even presenting a book called a circle of prayer to a publisher, who accepted it. but i was not quite happy with it, and only circulated it in xerox to a number of friends. (ironically, if it had been rejected i might have been defensive and tried harder to publish it.)

years passed, and i read more and taught more, sometimes about the history of the church year, sometimes about its meaning. i proudly had another work ready to publish about 1995, and the floppy discs holding it were stolen. so! more reading, more teaching, more recreation. and now, as the psalmist says, "i am old and greyheaded." if i am ever going to publish anything, it should be soon.

the delay has, i think, been very good. i am no longer interested in writing another history of the church year. i do not know of any that are actually adequate, even though some are very insightful. nor do i think justice can be done to the "meaning" of either individual feasts or of the whole cycle. what is the "meaning" of the holy one's self-revelation, beyond profound, enduring, tenacious love?

so what i present here is episodic and experiential, offered knowing that my understanding is inadequate, partial, seen "through a glass darkly." but it is also my testimony to the holy one's continual seeking of me and all his creatures in ways as ordinary as the sunrise, as spectacular as the sunset.

when did i begin my inadequate, partial look through the dark glass? in some ways as an eight-year old boy who walked down the aisle of walnut street baptist church in a small arkansas town to the singing of
"footsteps of jesus, that make the pathways glow;
i will follow the steps of jesus where'er they go."

but i was not always aware of following them in the years that followed, years that included taking a "year off" from my accustomed more-or-less orthodox christian practice to explore "natural religion/celtic christianity."

ultimately i have come to understand these "natural" events as revelations of god's christ, "because he wanted all perfection / to be found in him / and all things to be reconciled through him and for him, / everything in heaven and everything on earth, / when he made peace / by his death on the cross." (colossians 1:19-20)

i present this very imperfect essay because our common understanding of the christ tends to be so divided. some of us find "the cosmic christ," often described in sanscrit and usually separated from the cross. some of us find "a personal saviour," who may be the "first-born of all creation," (colossians 1:19) but who no longer has anything to do with the physical world. i believe neither of these views is adequate, and that a re-spect, literally a looking again, at how the holy one is revealed in time created, not as we have reinvented it in minutes and seconds, will help to broaden and unify our vision of the one who "is the image of the unseen god."