Homily for the Second Sunday after Christmas
Janus was the Roman god of the doorway. He guarded all entrances and exits. He is traditionally represented as having two faces, one looking back to the past, the other forward to the future. In January (the month of Janus) we can all identify with this: we look back to the year that has passed, and forward -often with foreboding- to the year ahead. The past is past, and therefore familiar; the future is not yet, and therefore strange. We are more comfortable with the familiar, so the backward gaze predominates. Inevitably, we have all been changed, for good or for ill, by the year that has passed. Old father time has left another footprint on our faces. Some of us have been changed for the good, or even the better!
Some of us may have lost loved ones during the year, either through death or emigration; others may have been broken by sickness or circumstance; others may have married and had children, and perhaps not necessarily in that order. Whatever our individual circumstances, we have all been changed in some measure by the year that has gone. It was Cardinal Newman who said that "to live is to change, to live fully is to change often." The challenge to us now is to be reconciled to this new self, to make ourselves at home with our changed circumstances. If we are to live fully human and productive lives, this reconciliation is essential. Otherwise we will waste ourselves and our days in pining after what is impossible or what is no more.
New Years Day then is above all a day for reflection. It is a day above all for reflection on time and how we use it. There was great rejoicing a couple of years ago because the travel time from Galway to Dublin had been reduced by a half hour because of the Maynooth bypass. We save over half an hour, several motorists claimed. But the real question is: What do you do with the half hour saved? Is the world, or even my own life, improved by my saving half an hour on the Dublin-Galway journey?
There is an old Irish saying: Life is a sigh between two mysteries. The journey from the womb to the tomb is a short one, regardless of the years we live. Time is a precious commodity. The poet said that the innocent and the beautiful have no enemies but time. Time challenges all of us, irrespective of our innocence or our beauty.
There are things money cannot buy but time can achieve. According to the Book of Wisdom in the Old Testament, if we take time we will find wisdom sitting outside our doors. Other things bought by time, not by money, are another person's respect and trust, and a clear conscience. We pay for each in installments, by the way we use our time. As our former government discovered, what took years to build up can be torn down in a few careless minutes. When we abuse time, we risk serious damage to our happiness.
It has been said that we die clutching in our hands only that which we have given away in our lifetime. This will be especially true of the way we use time. How we experience it as it ebbs from us will be coloured very much by the way we used it when we had plenty of it. In this sense, time is full of eternity. There are echoes here of what Jesus said about losing our life to find it.
This profound respect for time lies behind the Sabbath law. It recommends that we use our hands in service as well as our hearts in prayer. We are encouraged to spend time with our neighbour, especially when that neighbour needs our time. In Ireland there was a tradition on Sundays of hospitality and visiting, of doing nothing, yet doing what really matters. Now we spend Sundays on ourselves. We starve ourselves of rounded lives when we pack our Sundays with jobs that could wait till Mondays, or even Fridays.
Not a long time ago, there was great excitement when Telecom introduced its new phone charges. If we are to believe the letters page on the Irish Times, old egg timers were resurrected and pressed into service once more. For a short while, the whole nation was conscious of time. Sadly, the love affair with the egg-timer ended all too quickly. And the loss is ours. Because the egg timer is the most effective illustration we have of the ebb and flow of time. Time literally runs out before our eyes. But the more conscious we become of this, the more we will treasure time as a gift.