circle of prayer 23. day:week:month:year::life

the song of simeon provides the step on which to move from the rhythm of time as it plays in the cycles of earth and moon, sun and stars, to the beat of each life:

"lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
according to thy promise,
for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."

nunc dimmitis, book of common prayer translation

each of us is born, each of us dies. whether this happens in peace depends not on the occurances of our lives, but on our understanding, our comprehension, of them. we depart in peace if we have seen the lord's salvation.

the wonder, the mystery, is that the lord's salvation is always bigger than our understanding or comprehension. the church has over her long history founds ways of understanding the mighty acts of christ jesus, which is the fullness, the pleroma, of that salvation, not only through scriptures and tradition, but through our experience of time in the natural world. this has been the topic of this extended essay so far.

insofar as we are made in the image of god, so is christ the image of what our lives are to become, and the natural year becomes a revelation of our lives as well.

because our units of time, from a day to a year, repeat themselves in cycles, we can start our journey of understanding at any point on the wheel, trusting the returning to give us deeper faith and comprehension. what does not make sense today, this year, may be understood tomorrow, next year. but because there is always more, tomorrow and next year will bring new questions.

even though we can enter the cycle at any time, the entry most often occurs with what john wesley called the ordinary means of grace, the sacraments, which are related often to particular times of the year. the next few chapters consider those particular relationships.