It’s a cold, gray day.  The leaves on the apple tree, caught by an early frost before they had a chance to turn color and fall, hang brown and dried and shriveled.  More even than simple bare branches would, they seem to speak of something brought to an end—abruptly, even harshly. 

Big, slow snowflakes drift listlessly down through the dim winter light, as if to say, “Give it up—it’s over—no life here.”

And yet—and yet!  In both sacred and secular time, winter is the season of beginning.  Christmas—a new baby—the beginning of the earthly life of the Incarnate One.  January—a new year—with all those new year’s resolutions to start afresh in some way.  The feast of the baptism of the Lord—the beginning of Jesus’ public life.

Are the two calendars, sacred and secular, just trying to pep-talk us through the cold, dark season?  Or is there something more going on here?

Ponder with me, if you will, the mystery of endings and beginnings.

The first thing I notice is that they are not so separate, really.  Every ending implies the beginning of whatever comes next, just as every beginning implies the ending of whatever was before.

When a child loses a tooth for the first time, we celebrate with her and make much of the fact that she is becoming a “big girl” now.  But we may also feel a twinge at the passing of that precious era that went before, when she was our “little one.”

When a child is born, his parents embark on one of the most profound beginnings life has to offer, the terrifying, exhilarating, and sacred journey into motherhood and fatherhood.  At the same time, the era of these two together, discovering themselves and each other in relationship and forging a new identity as “us,” as lovers who are spouses, is over, replaced forever by the lover-spouse-parent era.

So endings and beginnings aren’t so separate, and maybe there’s a deep folk wisdom in putting the beginning of our sacred and secular years in the season when the natural world seems to speak of endings. 

The second thing that comes to mind, as I ponder the mystery of beginnings and endings, is that we as people of faith are called to be especially attuned to the “beginning” side of that mystery.

What is grace, after all, but God’s offer of a new beginning—over and over and over again, with an inexhaustible flow of love and mercy and creativity. 

At the end of his famous Rule for governing the lives of his monks—a rule which deals with grand themes like prayer and authority structures, as well as daily details like whether the monk serving at meals should have a snack beforehand (yes) or whether a monk should sleep with his knife in his belt (no)—at the end of this document which has so shaped all of Western Christian spirituality, St. Benedict describes it as “this little rule for beginners.”

He never wrote the rule for the advanced.

He knew that, in the life of grace to which God calls us, we are all, always, beginners.

Thank God for that, and may you make, once again, a good beginning.