New Year’s Eve.

Every calendar with its years is a culture’s invention, a way of breaking the eternal rolling of sunrises and sunsets into an order that suits our needs for what?

For celebration? For budgets? For control? For forgiveness? For hope?

All of the above and more?

Between the passing of one year and the dawning of another we sense a shifting, the movement of something that does not exist: time, the human way of marking turf in the eternal rolling of the spheres.

The tides of time pay no attention because, like time itself, the tides are timeless. They know nothing of us. They ebb and flow in ceaseless rounds of who knows what. And we, standing on the shore’s edge between two tides awaken again to the sense of wonder before what we do not control.

Perhaps Isaac Watts had something like that in mind when he paraphrased Psalm 90:

Before the hills in order stood,
or earth received its frame,
from everlasting thou art God
to endless years the same.

A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone,
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
they fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day.

Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guard while life shall last,
and our eternal home.

– Isaac Watts, 1719

Since the middle of the 19th century, Watt’s paraphrase has been sung to the tune of St. Anne, named after the London parish where Watts was organist. Click HERE for more on Sir Isaac Watts.