The Holy Habit of Beginning Again

A reflection on the rotations and revelations of our common life

Recently, I was sitting with a newcomer to Christ Church who comes to us from a Christian tradition almost diametrically opposed to the Anglican and Episcopal tradition. He was raised among Pentecostal and Congregationalist churches, where worship was often prized precisely for its spontaneity—for being organic, extemporaneous, and responsive to the movement of the Spirit in the moment.

And yet, something about the liturgical life of Christ Church has spoken deeply to him.

So, as we sat together, I attempted to give him what I thought was a fairly good primer on how all of this works.

I explained that our year begins not on January 1, but on the First Sunday of Advent. I talked about the three-year cycle of the Sunday lectionary, carrying us through Scripture again and again. I explained the colors that change with the seasons: purple, white, green, and red. I talked about feast days and fast days, about the rhythms of Lent and Easter, Advent and Christmas, Pentecost and the long green season that follows.

Then I widened the lens.

I explained that even our programmatic life tends to move in cycles. Formation follows the school year. Summer has its own rhythm, with a different emphasis on parish life and fellowship. Ministries and guilds have their patterns of work and rest. Some of these rhythms are embedded in the Book of Common Prayer itself. Others are kept in schedules, calendars, and—in my case—an increasingly elaborate administrative spreadsheet that I have developed over the years to keep myself and the leadership of Christ Church accountable to the work before us.

I was also talking about what I have learned about leadership and management, about co-leadership, about how we plan and prepare and hold all these moving pieces together.

It was, admittedly, becoming a fairly long-winded explanation.

And then he stopped me.

“But if you’re always beginning again,” he asked, “if you’re always starting over at the beginning, how do you ever go deeper with God?”

Without even thinking about it, I answered:

“It’s the only way we know how.”

I have thought about that exchange ever since.

It is easy to imagine the Christian life as a kind of merry-go-round. Advent becomes Christmas. Christmas gives way to Epiphany. Lent comes, then Easter, then Pentecost, then the long season after Pentecost—and before we know it, Advent comes around again. We hear readings we have heard before. We pray prayers we know by heart. We come to the same Table. We tell the same stories.

Round and round and round we go.

But perhaps a merry-go-round is the wrong image.

Maybe the Christian life is more like a screw.

It turns and turns, yes. We make revolution after revolution. But the point of all that turning is not simply to arrive back where we began. With every revolution, we are being drawn deeper—deeper into the life of Christ, deeper into the mystery of God, deeper into an understanding of ourselves and our neighbors, deeper into the Kingdom of God already breaking into the world around us.

We begin again because beginning again is how we go deeper.

One of the great temptations of religion is to imagine that God can somehow be mastered. If we learn the right prayers, understand the right theology, receive the right sacrament at the right moment, or follow the proper spiritual formula, perhaps God will become predictable. Pray this prayer and receive this result. Do this thing and God will respond in that way. Learn enough about the life of faith and perhaps, eventually, we will have God figured out.

But Scripture stubbornly resists such a small understanding of God.

The prophet Isaiah hears God declare, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways…for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8–9).

God is not a problem to be solved or a system to be mastered. God is inexhaustible.

And yet, the unknowability of God does not mean that God is unreliable. Quite the opposite. Scripture also tells us that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8).

There is a beautiful tension there.

God is always beyond us, and God is always faithful.

God cannot be contained, and yet God can be trusted.

And so we go around again.

We return to Advent. We return to Lent. We return to Easter. We hear the Scriptures again. We confess the Creed again. We stretch out our hands again. We receive bread and wine again. We baptize, marry, bury, forgive, feast, fast, sing, pray, serve—and then we begin again.

Not because there is nothing new to discover, but because there is always more.

Think of a truly great book. You read it once and love it. Years later, you pick it up again and discover something you completely missed the first time. Perhaps someone makes it into a film and suddenly you see a character or scene differently. So you return to the book again, and somehow the words have changed even though not a single word is different.

The book hasn’t changed. You have.

Perhaps that is something of what happens in the rhythms of the Church.

The Gospel we hear this year meets a person who is not quite the same person who heard it three years ago. The Eucharist we receive this Sunday is the same sacramental mystery we received last Sunday, but we arrive at the altar carrying another week’s worth of joy and grief, failure and hope, love and disappointment. Advent comes around again, but we are different people than we were last Advent.

And so another revolution carries us a little deeper.

The Church itself, of course, is not God. That distinction matters. The Episcopal Church can rightly be critiqued for a great many things. Our institutional history contains real sin and failure. The Episcopal Church has been complicit in some of the darkest chapters of American history, just as the wider Anglican Communion has been entangled with some of the worst chapters of our global history.

But those failures are not an indictment of the God toward whom the Church is trying, however imperfectly, to lead us.

The rhythms, habits, sacraments, prayers, Scriptures, feast days, and fast days of the Church are not ends in themselves. They are tools given to a community that is trying to go deeper into the mystery of God.

And this Sunday, at Christ Church, we begin another revolution.

We begin a new program year. We begin a new Sunday worship schedule. Rite I returns at 8:30 AM. JoyMass moves into its new place at 9:15, alongside the return of adult and youth formation. At 10:30, we gather for Rite II with hymns and choir. Our guilds will serve more broadly. Our Sunday mornings will become a little more complicated. We will stretch our people, our building, and our resources a little further.

And with the return of adult and youth formation, we also reach the culmination of nearly three years of work toward restoring intentional, lifelong Christian formation across the generations at Christ Church.

It may feel, for a while, as though the revolutions are simply getting faster.

But I hope we will remember what all this turning is for.

Formation, JoyMass, Rite I, Rite II, fellowship, service, Scripture, sacrament, prayer—none of these exists merely so that Christ Church can have more things on its calendar. They are part of the holy habit of beginning again.

We are drilling deeper.

Deeper into the mystery of God. Deeper into the life of Christ. Deeper into the Kingdom that is already among us. Deeper into learning how to recognize God when God appears in places we did not expect.

So, as another program year begins, I give thanks to God for the extraordinary growth and vitality of this community. But perhaps even more, I give thanks for its discipline: the willingness to return to the Scriptures, return to the Table, return to formation, return to one another, and begin again.

Around we go.

Not in circles, but deeper.

Because God remains the same yesterday, today, and forever—and we have only begun to discover the depths of who God is, together.

Pax et Bonum!

Fr. Ben