I HAVE a godson, Tom, whose birthday falls today, New Year’s Eve, so it always coincides with the turning of the year.

Tom has been brought up on a Cornish farm and is therefore more aware than many urban young people of the deep patterns and rhythms of the seasons — the time for sowing, the growth of crops and their harvesting, and the daily round of caring for animals and the milking of his father’s dairy cattle.

Tom was confirmed not so long ago, and that means he has an awareness of that other deep rhythm by which time is marked out in the Christian year. That round of feast and fast is a continual reminder of the larger story of our redemption. The secular distortions of that pattern — when Christmas comes in the stores even before Advent has begun and Easter eggs are for sale before Lent has started — are undermining something precious that aids our human growth.

In churches which follow traditional liturgical colours the mood is immediately set when you go into a church and find the red of martyrdom or the Holy Spirit, the purple of penitence, or the white and glorious gold of a great festival.

I once taught a young man from California who was fascinated by what theologians call “typology” — the anticipation of the events of the life of Christ in the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament. The early Christian Fathers, the first teachers of the Church, saw a providential pattern in the anticipation of baptism by the crossing of the Red Sea, and the yes of the Virgin Mary to the calling to become the mother of the Son of God — reversing Eve’s disobedience.

This young man told me that he found this understanding of time and history so fascinating because he had been brought up in a country where the sky was always blue, the sun always shone, in a family without any religious belief, and where one day simply succeeded the next. Without knowing quite why, he sensed that in order to grow as a human being he had to find a shape, a meaning and purpose to his life within a shape and meaning and purpose in history.

Christians have not always kept new year on January 1 — that was the Roman new year, and the Church was often very suspicious of it. Only in 1582 did Pope Gregory XIII’s reform of the calendar mean that January 1 was generally adopted. Jews kept the new year at the Feast of the New Moon at the end of September. England began the new year with the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25, and adopted January 1 only in 1752. Germany began with Christmas, and France and the Low Countries with Easter. The Orthodox East keeps New Year’s Day on September 1.

But, whatever the history, today is New Year’s Eve, the turning of the year, when briefly we pause to remind ourselves of past and present, with both penitence and thankfulness for the past, for the year that has gone, and hope for the future. In doing this we are heirs of a Western tradition that has a deep sense that time and history have meaning and purpose, unlike many Eastern religions with cyclical notions of time, and of a need for escape from the endless round of birth, death and rebirth.

Why is this? Because time and space are God’s creation, held in being by God, who is Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.

The cycle of the Christian year gives a Christian meaning to time by taking us year by year deeper into the meaning of the one life through which our lives are transfigured. Advent anticipates. At Christmas Christ comes among us — God-with-us — when, in St Paul’s words, “the fullness of time was come”. At Epiphany we see the fulfilment of the yearning of the non-Jewish world. Lent, Passiontide and Holy Week mark the sacrificial costliness of the Divine Love in a sinful world. Easter and Ascension catch this life, and our lives, to the heavenly places, and Pentecost — the Feast of God-in-us — runs out into the transforming grace which makes men and women saints of God, those stamped and sealed with the likeness of Christ.

It is this pattern which Christians seek to have engraved on their lives when, at the turning of the year, we pause and seek to turn to prayer; the time of our lives, the time that God has given to us.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe