As always on this date, we have an intertwining of Mary’s feast with the beginning of the new year. The theme that unites them for me this time around is the concept of time.

Mary was a creature in time, as the readings remind us today. When the fullness of time had come, says St. Paul, Mary’s nine months time of waiting was over and she brought forth God’s Son and hers into our time/space/matter dimension. The shepherds went in haste, says the Gospel, not wanting to waste time, it seems, to find the Child in Bethlehem. All the amazing happenings Mary kept, reflecting on them in her heart over years of time, as she watched her Son grow into the man he was destined to be. The shepherds returned to their day-to-day work times, and in the days ahead became the first missionaries, telling what they had experienced, what they had heard and seen, unbelievable times as they must have seemed to their hearers. And the Gospel concludes with a recounting of Jesus’ circumcision, a long-time Jewish ritual performed eight days after a boy’s birth.

Time can be seen as a prison or as a gift. It’s a prison if we let ourselves be taken up with its limitations: unforgiving and unforgiven memories from the past; anxious concerns for the future, frustrating waiting for outcomes we don’t know.

It can become a gift if we remain in that part of time, the only fragment of time that truly exists, that’s ever really ours. And that fragment is the present moment. The present moment has been called a sacrament by the spiritual writer deCaussade. His book, The Sacrament of the Present Moment was given to me to read by Sister Patricia Rechtenwald when I was a scholastic, apparently because she wisely thought I needed it. I still need it today. And I suspect many of us do. It’s helpful for me to realize that all we ever knew about the past has been carried into the present and affects our views, our ideas, our concerns here and now. The past has molded us into the person we are in the Now, responding from those past experiences to this moment because of who we have become because of them. The only effect we can have on the future comes from our view of the present and who we are in it. How the future will play out in some scenario we can only imagine. Whether those things we write mental scripts about will come to pass remain a mystery until revealed ahead of this time at some other now moment of our lives.

All of these thoughts are humbling. We are so poor in what we can really possess; just this small moment of time. But these thoughts are also the groundwork of peace. Despite our learning that over and over in our days, we still slip out of the Now moment into past and future time. That’s part of being human, of course. Were we able to live only and always in the present, we would be beyond time and in eternity. We can know that Now is all we can truly be responsible for, that fully to enter it is profound richness. These are some of my thoughts in the middle of the night when that nightly devil goes about seeking whom he may devour. Sometimes these thoughts comfort me; sometimes they don’t when the now is a time of strife and worry and regret because, try as I will, I just can’t stay there, here, present, now. I can only long to be there, here, present, now.

Where does Mary come into all this? Well, she, too, was a creature in time—as was her Son, we must remember. But to consider Mary for a moment: She had wondrous awarenesses that shaped her life minute by minute, experiences that formed her into who she was in each successive present time that followed. There was, for example, the Angel’s visit, the marvels of her Son’s birth, the joy of watching him learn to talk, to play, to help Joseph at his work. There were the sad and worrisome times: when he was lost, when he left home, when she wondered what on earth he was about, when Joseph and Jesus died, when she was left in the care of her Son’s friends, missing him. She didn’t know the future either. Where was her lifetime leading her? No answer came for her, as it doesn’t for any of us. She was a woman surrounded by mystery, one she asked about when we first meet her in the Gospel: “How can this be done?” Again, this is a consolation. If Mary, the Mother of God remembered what was in her heart, worried about her Son and spent long, patient-demanding days without knowing her future, can we expect more?

J. Larson wrote about all this in his song from the show Rent. I won’t sing it for you, but here are some of the words. The song concludes with another consolation, I think, for all of us, whether we find ourselves in a moment of peace or a moment of strife; that is, a moment when we aren’t able to be in the moment.

          “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.
          How do you measure a year in a life?
          In daylight? In sunsets? In midnight cups of coffee?
          In inches? In miles? In laughter and strife?
          In journeys to plan?
          How do you measure the life of a woman or a man?
          In truths that you learn? Or in times that you cry?
          How about love? Seasons of love? Seasons of love!"

May 2012 be a time of greater presence in the present for all of us. May we find, therefore, times of peace. May January, 2013, find us more loving, more contented than we are now to be creatures in a world of time. May we forgive ourselves for the impatience that being human can cause. May we know many Seasons of Love. May we ask Mary, Mother of the God who chose to live in time by taking on her flesh, may this Mary be with us through these Seasons. She knows the way; she walked it before us. She knows the pull we have between being a human being in time, and sharing the life of Love, the Eternal Now, himself. Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.