Human time counts seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries and so on. We have all sorts of tools to keep track of where we are on our own personal human timeline. These include calendars, watches and timers. When we are young, school time can seem endless. As we grow older life goes by faster and faster, until it seems that the end of time on this earth will too soon be upon us.
Liturgical time is when we remember and celebrate that thanks to Jesus Christ the death we are all rushing towards cannot prevail. Jesus who lives yet within us is calling us to a new beginning and a new way of being. Liturgical time strengthens us to endure the hardships of human time. The liturgical year, properly practiced offers new insights each season into whom we are meant to be.
I very much appreciate Sr Joan’s take on the ‘struggle between two emotional magnets’, particularly in this time and place that we find ourselves living. We are experiencing so much geographic, social and political chaos in our families, villages, cities, nations and, indeed, around the world. At the same time there is so much beauty in God’s creation. The story of the death and Resurrection of Jesus is the call to actualize that beauty. Rather than worshiping ourselves, in the liturgy we worship the God who so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, so that this world may have ‘the stuff of the divine’. A humanity that worships God in Jesus Christ with the power of the Holy Spirit is a healthy humanity. And that ‘worship is the heart of the liturgical year.’