Greetings of the New Year 7525

The Indiction, or New Year’s Day of 7525 anno mundi, begins at sundown,
the 31st of August, 2016 anno Domini.

I write these words in the wee morning hours of New Year's Eve—yes, the morning of the evening before the first day of the year, not of our Lord, but of the (creation of the) world—and once again I can hardly believe how time flies. Just think, it's only been seven thousand five hundred and twenty-five years since the world was created. Sheer nonsense to the scientist. Even worse for the free-thinking modern who already's been burned by Archbishop Ussher's marginal date of the world's genesis four thousand four years before Christ. ‘We weren't born yesterday,’ they all think, who know for sure that the world is a globe that circles a star which is one of billions of other stars in the local cluster of billions of galaxies. And I must say I agree with them, that they weren't born yesterday—at least not literally yesterday, only a yesterday about seven and a half thousand years ago.

Because somewhere and somewhen about that short time ago what we now are was let loose out of a mass of evolutionary biology that had been in the making for—gulp! yes—billions of years in an existential event briefly described in a book called the Holy Bible and defined by the Divine utterance of ‘Let there be.’ In that Book it isn't quite as specific as we have (since it was written) figured out, that this letting loose happened in the northern hemispheric season of autumn, and for the reason that there had to be fodder for the animals, and for us, to eat. Well, I am not too sure this explanation for why the event was a fall event is valid. I mean, it isn't as though what existed and was alive before us didn't eat to live. Of course they did, but until we were let loose, till we emerged as fully alert, rational and conscious beings, we didn't know that we were—literally—at all.

A living creature not conscious of itself is not to be differentiated from the primordial clay, it is impersonal, it needs to have personhood breathed into it, it needs to be a living soul, it must be able to say and mean ‘I’—no small thing and as rare in the spectrum of living things as life is rare in the physical universe. Only two events can (and should) grab our attention in the world in which we live, and from which we may well chronicle our lives: our creation, that which is called the first Adam, and our re-creation, that which is named the second Adam. In the first event, what was a mere animal was raised to human life; in the second, that which was merely human was raised to life eternal. If we do not marvel at or doubt that the second event, divine incarnation, transfiguration, and resurrection happened and mark the passage of time, neither should we marvel at or doubt the first event.

It is history, that first event whereby the human race came into existence, man, then woman, to whom were entrusted the naming of the animals, and the taming of the universe, just as it is history, that second event whereby the Divine Nature, not satisfied in generating biological life from inert minerals, nor even rational life from mere animals, Themselves defying all supernatural protocol and the envy of angelic beings, dives down to retrieve from the abyss of created being Their image with the purpose of marrying it to the Uncreated, proclaiming, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.’ This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.