The day before...

I was cleaning up the random documents on my laptop the other day, and, based on the first line of this entry, I saved it in my Religious Ed folder. But today I read it, probably for the first time since I wrote it. The document was created February 13, 2016 at 1:38 AM, and saved on February 13, 2016 at 1:57 AM. I wrote this in less than 20 minutes, but more importantly, I wrote this almost exactly 24 hours before Nick died. I wrote this knowing we were running out of time, but not how soon the hourglass would be empty:

The Church year has its own ebb and flow to it. We begin at Advent, and here in the Northern Hemisphere, we celebrate the shortest day and the birth of the Light in the same week. Easter, our rebirth, falls at the end of winter, the beginning of Spring, and we are reborn just as the earth is. When we experience the Church calendar without comparing it to the passing seasons, we take it out of context a bit. The Church calendar renews and rejuvenates us each year, just as the passing seasons renew and rejuvenate the earth. When we are children, we rarely appreciate the passage of time except how it relates to our own age, our own grade. When we are older, we see time differently, we connect it to events surrounding us: Aunt Katty died two Christmases ago; Daddy celebrated his first Easter in heaven this year. But I don’t think most people contemplate or understand the renewing aspect of our Church year, that leads us through salvation history each year. When you think about it, even the way Christmas and Easter are relatively close together, and then the long period of Ordinary Time before we again enter Advent, mimics the years of first waiting for the birth of Christ, his short time on earth, his death and resurrection, and our long wait for the Second Coming.

This year, more so in the past, I’m rather hyper-sensitive to the passage of time and the Church calendar. At Christmas 2014, we didn’t know that Christmas 2015 would pass with Nick home, but too ill to even open gifts. Easter 2013, when I thought I was going to lose him, seems both so long ago and a moment ago, and Easter 2016, which he is not expected to see, is racing to us too, too quickly.

But every Easter, I’ll have the specific memory of the Easters before, and rejoice in the promise of the Resurrection; every Christmas will be empty without him, but full of joy for the Christmases we had together. The repeating pattern has its own comfort; it grounds us in this world as it prepares us for the next.