What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
– T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
This morning I took a pair of photos that I have been looking forward to taking for a while.
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These are my journals. On the left of the photos is the journal that I completed last eve: it transitioned yesterday from living document to archive. The one on the right is my new journal, 240 pages of blank, crisp potential and uncertainty.
I don’t believe that I have ever before ended a journal to coincide with the end of the calendar year. But I really wanted to do that to finish 2021 – I wrote more and with greater frequency these past few weeks in order to make it to the finish line. (Getting there was a push: I write small, maybe 6-point font, so the pages in notebooks like these last me a long time.) But make it I did.
I’m not 100% sure why this goal felt important to me. But I’ll tell you why I look forward to taking photos such as the ones above. And maybe that will offer at least some insight as to why I wanted the timestamp on these two photos to point us into a new year.
I have, pretty much my whole life, been in the ritual business. As an actor in public school, a stagehand and stage manager as a young adult, and today as a priest, I’ve devoted myself to the conviction that gathering in community to name the changes and chances of life matters and, indeed, that it matters deeply. There is something about the lights going down, the curtain coming up, the procession walking into the church. In these moments – these gloriously unnecessary, wonderfully impractical moments – we discover… well, what?
Truth?
Freedom?
Possibility?
Joy?
Holiness?
We are at the limits of words here. But I do know that, over and over, I’ve seen performers and sculptors and priests take some ordinary thing, some almost silly thing – a prop sword, a lump of clay, the bread on Sunday morn – and, with the participation of the people gathered, turn it into something heavy with meaning.
And I guess that heavy with meaning is exactly what these two journals are for me. The red one is scarred by time in backpacks and suitcases and briefcases; it’s filled with observations banal and, maybe, occasionally profound; it’s swollen with glued-in train tickets and clippings from newspapers and prayers and notes from friends; it’s thicker around the middle than it used to be; it wears the traffic of time on its body.
It’s a little bit like me. Maybe it’s a little bit like you.
And the blue one? Well, it’s the future, isn’t it? Full of promise, full of stories unwritten, maybe full of danger and disappointment. But also unreadable, pristine in its potential and in its absence of life. It doesn’t begin until the pencil first touches its pages.
I am thankful for the red journal (and I promise this is not a Matrix reference – the colors are a coincidence). And after 2021, after everything that year held, I am ready to put it on the shelf for a while. I am ready for the new book to begin.
Yours in the Love of Christ,
Martin Elfert
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