Gentle Followers, I am behind and off-track. My calendar is a wilderness of commitments. 

I wanted to leave you a world for the next nine months: Marytide.

In the midst of the Lenten season as we prepare to walk the way of Calvary, a way of suffering and death, we are also walking the way of new life in what I call Marytide. The Feast of the Annunciation is also a feast of the incarnation. We celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation on 25 December, but the moment the Word becomes flesh on our calendar — which does not necessarily correlate with the world beyond the pages of the calendar — is 25 March when we celebrate that Love has come into the wilderness of the world in a virgin’s womb. For the next nine months as we pass through Holy Week, Easter and Eastertide, Pentecost and the Season After Pentecost and, Advent we shall be walking with Mary in her miraculous pregnancy.

In the medieval period, some marked the change of the year with the Feast of the Annunciation so that the year turned on this day and not 1 January, a sign that this was the day on which the world began to turn. 

This pencil and mixed media artwork entitled “Expectation” by Curtis Woody is from my personal collection.