Back in the the mid-to-late 1990’s, there was a popular hit on the radio called “Closing Time” that compared birth to last call at a bar. The songwriter and lead singer of the band had a pregnant wife during the recording of the album, which led a lot of songs to be about the aspect of birth. Yet, being a somewhat melancholy and reflective person, the singer could not simply imagine birth without reflecting that the new beginning of birth came with an end as well. The lyrics were not themselves particularly profound, but they were reflective enough to make the song an extremely popular one, a song whose popularity depended a great deal on context, on the approaching end of the second millennium AD, when the world was in a somewhat reflective mood.

Part of the reason why I appreciated the song so much myself was a matter of context. At around the same time, the church where I attend had a magazine called “New Beginnings,” as a way of representing the fresh start in the face of a traumatic time. The sense of a new beginning was a deliberate and sincere attempt to forge a better path along different lines than we had known before. Of course, as is often the case in such situations, what is wanted by people is complicated and not always openly expressed. There are some people who believed that all of the old ways should be kept, with new faces, namely themselves. There were others who distinguished between the ways of God and the traditions of man, and saw considerable room for chance in the one and a continuity of belief with the other. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the new beginning was the result of something ending.

Today I am finishing a lengthy book about Charlemagne, and his attempt to restore (in the eyes of himself and his contemporaries) the borders of the Western Roman Empire were seen as a new beginning but also as a continuity with established old ways that were well-regarded and respected. Of course, what had been imagined as a lasting and powerful regime did not end up that way, as the horrors of the Viking age started even before Charlemagne was dead and buried, and would only continue to get worse over the ensuing two hundred and fifty years, before the Normans themselves were more or less swallowed up into most of the realms where they had gone, being particularly Irish Irishmen, somewhat aristocratic French-speaking English elites, and Frenchmen not too different from their neighbors, to say nothing of their being swallowed up into Russian/Ukrainian and Italian society in the places of their kingdoms.

What would a thoughtful and reflective Frank have thought in the late 8th century as the Frankish empire got larger and larger and more and more recognized in world politics? Would someone have thought that this was the dawning of a glorious new age, or would they have recognized that it was the Indian summer of a late Roman Empire before an age of conflict and grave troubles? With the benefit of hindsight, we can see what happened and reflect upon the evanescent nature of the glory that was in the past. What will other generations have to say about our own age? Will they shake their head at our follies, or praise us for our efforts to fight against the darkness. I suppose time will tell; hopefully the verdict of history is kinder to us than we deserve.