New Year Time

  One can reflect at length on the meaning of celebrating the New Year and on what significance this feast has for Orthodox Christians who regularly attend church.

Yesterday it was the previous year, and today it is already the New Year. We have all grown older by a significant stretch of time. We have already crossed the threshold of the age we will turn this year, regardless of whether our birthday is soon or at the very end of the year. “The newspapers” have already reported that the first children of the new year have been born.

The Confessions of Saint Augustine consist of thirteen books. The first ten are his spiritual autobiography, a narration of the human journey toward God. The last three books are an interpretation of the opening words of the biblical Book of Genesis on the creation of the world. In a sense, this is no longer the biography of a human being, but a “biography of being.”

It is precisely the last books of the Confessions that are devoted to reflections on time. Saint Augustine is considered one of the Fathers of modernity. He was the first to think about time in the way that is characteristic of all of us. Of course, time existed before him, but no one before him made time the subject of such reflection.

But this reflection on the wholeness of human life in time also has an earlier, ecclesial context. Even before Augustine, within the tradition of the Fathers of the Church, there was already the idea that the life of Christ embraces and sanctifies the entire fullness of human existence. In this sense, Irenaeus of Lyons (130–202), a bishop and martyr who was a disciple of the direct disciples of the apostles, is especially important. “Christ lived through all ages and was crucified as an old man” is one of the most striking quotations from Irenaeus in his work Against Heresies. He emphasizes that the Son of God became incarnate in such a true and complete way that He assumed all of humanity. This approach in his theology is called “recapitulation,” that is, the “heading up” or “re-gathering” of all humanity in Christ. He does this not only from a “vertical” perspective — spirit, soul, and body — but also in a “horizontal” perspective, sanctifying, living through, and blessing every moment of our life and our biography.

It is in this perspective that Saint Augustine also speaks, though in another way: “God, being beyond time, became temporal in Jesus Christ. He Himself became time in order to free us from time.”

A special place in the life of the Church is occupied by the sacraments, prayers, and liturgical texts, especially the sacrament of anointing of the sick and prayers for the ill. All of them are directed with particular force toward our body and our bodily existence. This expresses the thirst for healing and transfiguration with which the human being is called to live. They ask God for the healing and restoration of the body, in which each of us, in one way or another, sooner or later, will encounter death. It is in this very body that we are destined to die.

Let us give thanks to God for the grace of beginning the New Year and each day of our lives with this blessing, together with the Church, in its life-giving and renewing reality.