During the Christmas season, we see how the incarnation of Jesus transforms our history and opens the way to eternity. Meanwhile, Mary, Mother of God and our mother, accompanies us at the beginning of the year as a sign of care, hope, and incarnate faith.
The beginning of a new year is not just a change in the calendar. It is, above all, a profoundly human experience of time, one that resonates within us and reveals who we are and where we are directing our lives.
Time is not experienced in only one way, and the way we experience it conditions our way of living, waiting, and relating to others.
Some people experience time cyclically, like agriculture: sowing, waiting, and harvesting, knowing that each year everything begins anew, without guarantees or accumulated wealth. The past does not assure the future. Each cycle demands newfound trust.
Others experience linear time, continuous progress, indefinite growth, and constant self-improvement. It is the time of the modern world and capitalism: always produce more, advance further, climb higher. The present is subordinate to what will come next.
Others live in a timeless existence: the days are all the same, a sterile repetition, devoid of meaning, without horizon or hope. They are the excluded, the discarded, those who live on the margins of social and economic rhythms.
Saint Augustine and Time
Saint Augustine offers a crucial insight into what he calls “moral time,” intimately linked to the actions and destiny of the person. Human time is finite, made of change and death. Each stage dies to give way to the next: childhood, adolescence, youth. Life is like a dying life or a living death (Confessions 1,6,7).
God transcends this logic: He is Life in its fullness, without wear or decay. And precisely for this reason, God becomes incarnate, to teach humanity to live time in a different way. The Incarnation breaks the curse of time-death and transforms it into a space of conversion, where every moment is oriented toward God. It ceases to be a threat and becomes a time of salvation.
In Jesus, God enters our history, assumes our flesh and our temporality, and opens the possibility of a different life: a life oriented toward inner freedom and toward the fullness of the image of God that we are called to be. God does not impose himself from the outside, but descends into our fragility to heal it from within.
The profound dynamism of existence is no longer determined by the passage of time, but by love: “My love is my weight” (Confessions 13,9,10). That which we love guides us and gives us direction: we do not walk propelled by time, but drawn by a love that lifts us toward eternity.
Christianity is, in its deepest sense, the religion of the incarnate God: first in Christ and, through the action of the Spirit, in every person: “we are temples of the Spirit of God.” God did not merely pass through history; He remains, dwelling within it.
Saint Augustine understood the Incarnation of Jesus as the concrete beginning of the history of salvation. The Word made flesh is the condition for human beings to participate in the undeserved gift of union with God.
Maria, the one who gave her consent
Yesterday, January 1st, we celebrated Mary, Mother of God. It is a central affirmation of the faith: God entered time through the free consent of a woman, and her motherhood extends to all those in whom God dwells.
Mary is the spiritual mother of all hearts where God continues to make himself present. The Christian year begins under her maternal care. As Augustine said, “a woman gave birth to life for us” (Sermon 184), and we Christians must imitate her by letting the Word of God take root in our actions and thoughts.
Let us live time in a different way: as a space where God acts, as history inhabited by his Spirit, and as a path that, even though traversed by fragility, remains open to eternity.
