Seasons and Cycles (2)

Note: This post is a continuation of a previous post. The first three paragraphs are from the original.

Our lives are marked by seasons and cycles, ebbs and flows and pendulum swings. Even our progressions are circular, spiraling around a line.

In August the earth hurtles toward equinox, the equanimity of darkness and light. The planet has traveled enough in its orbit that the mornings are laden with dimness and dew. The birds, triggered by the glimmering of dawn, are at this time of year in the midst of their singing during my morning prayers. When I get up, the world is still heavy with dark, heavy in the half-light of dawn. When I drive to work, I need the visor to shield my eyes from the risen sun.

The earth keeps spinning on its axis, the moon continues to orbit the earth, and these two, together with the other planets and the bodies within their influence, go on wheeling around the sun, the fixed point in all of this movement.

On September 1st, the church year begins, the cycle of feasts and fasts. On the eighth, we celebrate the first of the twelve major feasts—the Nativity of Mary, the Mother of God. The story goes that Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna, were unable to conceive a child. In ancient Hebrew culture, this was a great disgrace, a sign of God’s displeasure, because it meant that Joachim’s line would die, that they could not through childbearing participate in the continuing work of creation, that they would not be able to bring the Messiah into the world—for certain, Israel’s promised deliverer would not come through them. Into their old age, these servants of God prayed for a child, but their prayers were not answered.

One day, Joachim went to the temple to make his offering and was turned away by the high priest, who reproached him for his lack of descendants and humiliated him by turning him away. Bitterly Joachim fled to the hills to sit in his despair and hide his shame. Praying there, he was visited by an angel, who at the same time appeared to Anna in their home in Jerusalem. The angel announced that Anna would bear a child who would be blessed by God, whose name would be known throughout the world. In her gratitude, Anna promised her child to God, and Joachim, more than a little uplifted, hurried home. They met at the city gate and embraced, full of joy.

And we rejoice. Out of the barrenness of the aged curse of brokenness and death comes life. With Mary’s birth, the womb foreordained to bear God—to contain the Uncontainable and make possible the union of God and man—enters the world. God’s incarnation, the basis of our faith, already is set in motion at her conception.

The year begins with so much promise. New clothes and school supplies, new classes. The approach of the autumn harvest. The beginning of sports seasons, Sunday school, book clubs and other groups. After a summer of recess and recreation, we welcome the return of routine and structure and purpose. Everything is fresh and new. And with the earliest hints of color in the trees and crispness in the air, with the blue skies and clear light of September, with the better rest that comes with cooler weather and earlier sunsets—with so much transformation in the air, it’s easy to believe that the birth of Mary, the Theotokos (Mother of God), as we sing in the kontakion hymn on the day of the feast, is not just the promise of goodness but even its accomplishment:

Your holy birth delivered Joachim and Anna from the reproach of childlessness
and delivered Adam and Eve from death’s corruption, O Pure One.
Thus freed from the stain of sin, we your people honor your birth, crying out to you:
“A woman thought barren brings forth the Theotokos, who nourishes Christ our Life.”*

(to be continued)

Notes
* “Kontakion for the Birth of the Theotokos,” in Kevin Lawrence, Apolitikia and Kontakia (Greensboro, NC: Dormition of the Theotokos Greek Orthodox Church, 1993, 1997), 128–29.