the guy who makes windows

…because, at every new year, time begins ab initio.”^1,2

The view from what was once known as The Women’s Annex of Harvard.

Originally built for the Harvard men who died in World War I, the Memorial Church spire rises in the distance.

New Year’s, as we moderns know it, is not a religious holiday. But it has a faint spiritual echo – an echo of sacred time. In sacred time ‘the rebirth’ of the yearly cycle really is ‘the birth’ of the cosmos:

“…sacred time is indefinitely repeatable.”³

What calls forth sacred time from the normal course of profane time? Ritual.

For Ayla who got me thinking again, after many years, about the sacred. Most especially for Alex who brings it forth for me.

¹ Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, Harcourt 1987 p.73

²Eliade is referring to sacred time.

³ibid. p. 69. {Gratuitously pedantic in the age of mouse-click cut and paste. 🙂 }