The New Year is a good time to consider the rhythm of our lives. Different calendars record different rhythms. “Day-Timers” help us chronicle what the Greeks called chronos, “clock time,” the precisely measured minutes and hours that we fill with work. Gardening calendars remind us of the rhythms of seeds and harvest. Our liturgical calendars remind us of the rhythms of fast and feast: of Lent and Easter, Advent and Christmas, and “ordinary time” in-between.

How do we learn to celebrate what the Greeks called kairos, an intersection of now and eternity, a kind of “timeless time” we cannot measure in minutes? Kairos is about meaning, not minutes; ecstasy, not efficiency; consummation, not consumption. We find our way into this kairos through prayer, ritual, ceremony and celebration, poetry, and above all, love.

Blessing Calendars

The New Year is a good time to bless our new calendars and remind ourselves that “all days are for celebration and contemplation, for giving and receiving love.” When I lived in monastic community, we all put our calendars under the altar in chapel on January 1. Dogs, gardens, desert canyons, wild animals, quilts, Impressionist paintings, a word-a-day, a cartoon-a-day, a meditation-a-day: brightly colored calendars of every shape and size and subject spread out before us. In the center sat my favorite, Arizona Highways, reminding me that I began my monastic life and my love affair with the desert simultaneously in Sedona, Arizona in 1967.

Under the altar we also placed liturgical calendars to remind us of saints’ days, holy days, and feast days for Christ, Our Lady, and the great mystics of the Christian faith, each day an opportunity for personal transformation.

As a child I was taught to distinguish between feast days and “ferial” days, all the ordinary days which make each festal day that much more special. In Supper of the Lamb, a cookbook full of profound theology (or is it a theological book full of recipes?), Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon wrote: “Let us [live] festally first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and the grand ordinariness must never go unsavored.”

Under the altar, then, you would also see plain grey boxes of pragmatic “daytimer” calendars. Yes, even as monks we used daytimers. Hermits use them, too. Fr. Dave loves his, though I keep track of important matters with my own simpler system. We need to record arrival and departure times for our travels, schedules for retreats, meetings with our little board of directors, when we work together, especially on our web sites and podcasts, and when we’re in solitude. Then there are all those deadlines for our Desert Foundation newsletter, Caravans: writing, editing, art and lay-out, mailing.

A New Year’s Prayer

Ever since those early monastic years, I have said the following prayers over my calendars every New Year’s Day as I immerse myself anew in the deep mystery of chronos and kairos. (I learned the prayers first from an old Carmelite nun and then made her language more universal.)

Maker of the universe, you who live beyond time, and reside in the imperishable moment, we ask your blessing this New Year upon your gift to us of time.  Bless our calendars, these ordered lists of days, weeks and months, of holy days, fasts and feasts. May they remind us that all days are for celebration and contemplation, for giving and receiving love. Bless this New Year, each of its three hundred and sixty-five days and nights. Bless us with peace and joy. And grant to us the New Year’s gift of a year of love.

O You in whom we live and move and have our being, I see this new year as a blank page on which you will write day by day what you will give me. With full confidence I am writing at the top of the page from now on: “Yes.” And at the bottom I have already put my “Amen.” I say “Yes” to all the joys, to all the sorrows, to all the graces, to all the hardships you will  reveal to me day by day. Let my “Amen” always be followed by “Alleluia,” uttered with all my heart in the joy of perfect giving. Amen.