The Hope of a World Transfigured

Two weeks after everybody else, I have begun thinking about what the new year holds. After a decade of convent life, my sense of time, space, and self has been so effectively remolded on the spinning pottery wheel of the liturgical year that seeing the first of January as the beginning of anything—rather than the solemnity marking the end of the Christmas Octave and the transition to the latter half of Christmastide—is something I find increasingly difficult. It’s only once I see The end of Christmastide. printed starkly at the end of the second Vespers of the Baptism of the Lord (bright red, with a full stop to boot) that I can begin to come to terms with the reality of the new chronological year.