05 January 2009

THE FIRST DAY OF THE NEW YEAR


THE CIRCUMCISION OF CHRIST
from
The Crown of the Year: Weekly Paragraphs for the Holy Sacrament
by Austin Farrer

"WHEN a calendar year comes to an end, we feel cheated. Nothing in fact has been ended, nothing rounded off and finished. The year is not a piece of work completed and done; we cannot hold on to, or possess, what it has accomplished. We have leartn many things, but all our learning seems still to lie before us. We have enjoyed many things, but our happiness has het to be earned. We have served God—how little—and we have still to find out what the service of God truly is, and who the God truly is whom we serve. Yet in every moment while time thus bafflingly slips from us, we are in the hands of him who is eternal and changes not. Our Christ, the Christ we offer up here, the Christ on whom we feed here, the Christ whose body we are here, is eternal God as well as changeable man. Our grasp of eternity is small, but eternity grasps, fills and uses us. For we are the body of an eternal Christ."
Austin Farrer