Reflections with Fr. James

January invites reflection on time. We might linger with this question beyond New Year’s Day. In his preaching and theology, Joseph Ratzinger, and later Pope Benedict XVI, returns often to the theme. In a New Year’s Eve homily, he observed that the passing year is not erased, but entrusted to God’s mercy, where every moment remains present before Him, since he is eternal.

Benedict believed that the liturgy is a way for us to slow down time and enter into God’s eternity. He once wrote, “The liturgy is not concerned with time in the ordinary sense, but with God’s time. It draws us out of what is merely momentary and inserts us into the great ‘today’ of God. In this way, it liberates us from the tyranny of the clock. Time becomes meaningful because it opens toward eternity. In the liturgy, the past is not simply past, and the future not merely future. The Paschal Mystery of Christ transcends time, and yet it is present in time. Thus human time is taken up into God’s time and transformed.” (Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 70-71).

As we enter into the new year, the Church teaches us to receive time as a gift of God. Through prayer, liturgy and contemplation, we are invited to enter God’s eternity.