Lift Up Your Hearts

Tomorrow is the feast of the Epiphany - maybe. The 6th January is when the arrival of the Wise Men is commemorated, but it is often now kept on the nearest Sunday. This is the case with almost all major festivals - except Christmas of course as those of us who spent most of last weekend in church one  way and another can  testify!

Schools make even greater transfers of dates. Christmas at Haileybury was done ans dusted before the fourth Sunday of Advent because of the term dates. The short Holidays are set when they are to allow the celebration of the great Festivals of Christmas and Easter, meaning that for active church families they can be almost busier than term time. In 2011 term starts again on Easter Monday with no relief for those who will have just completed the rigours of Passiontide and Holy Week.

Time in fact is of course not as rigid as we like to think. The New Year is just a convenience of measurement - nothing real about it. our measurements are relative to each other, but not fixed by anything objective. Even BC and AD are probably wrong. But they do attempt to point us to something eternal, by giving us as the point of reference the moment at which the timeless One bound Himself into time for us. There is a logic in the financial year renewing around the quarter day on March 25th, which marks not the birth, but the beginning of the Incarnation at the Annunciation (celebrated exactly nine months before Christmas).

I guess few if any of us will have celebrated the turn of the calendar year as pupils or adults at Haileybury: but new years in the first days of September and new terms in January and April remind us that our time is less 'real' than the eternity to which the succession of our dates point.

Happy Epiphany!