The Union of Change and Permanence

I think the reason we (a general we) love Septembers and Januaries so well is that we crave fresh starts. That's why the changing of the seasons, the first day of a new month, and even morning can be so inviting.

I am celebrating today—September 1st: the symbolic beginning of a new year, a new season, a new month, a new day—because I am always grateful for a grace-filled fresh start.

And yet, I crave the familiar. The traditional bouquet of freshly-sharpened pencils.

My 9th year of homeschooling, our 6th year with Classical Conversations, my 42nd autumn, a mountain of months, and seemingly countless days. They are all a gift.

As C.S. Lewis brilliantly illuminates in The Screwtape Letters:

“[H]umans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, [God] has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.”

 

My wish for you for on this first day of September, wherever you find yourself in life, is that you are able to find your rhythm and to celebrate the glorious union of change and permanence.