The Scottish musician Dougie MacLean through the years has given a great modern rendition of Robby Burns’ poem “Auld Lang Syne,” which somehow became a world anthem of New Year’s Eve.

Not that many know what the Scots words mean. The custom of singing a song whose words we often don’t really understand is a rare true mystery of modern global culture.

But the song, whose title loosely means “For Old Time’s Sake,” is about remembering friends.

And Orthodox Christians can dig that, with an extra spiritual dimension added.

At New Year’s and every day we can remember also how Jesus Christ called us His friends, in Him calling us to love one another more than ourself (and, as we often forget, that our enemies are really our best friends spiritually).

Near the end of The Brothers Karamazov, which many secular and faithful people alike rank as the greatest novel ever written, the Orthodox Christian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky has one of his characters note that it can be just one good memory in the end that saves us. Like virtue, memory can be a ladder of uncreated grace, which is based not in legalistic logic but in love.

The New Year’s song can remind us of redeeming memory in both senses: Memories that help redeem us, and memories that God’s grace redeems for us.

The language of “Auld Lang Syne” (literally “Old Long Since”), comes from Scots English, an old variety of English from the Scottish Lowlands that is the closest living dialect to Chaucer’s Middle English. Parts of that archaism rubbed off here in American Appalachia too. Scots was the signature language of the Scots-Irish who are a signature historical culture in Appalachia where our humble Orthodox mission is located.

Although in a different old dialect and written down later, the song’s old language partly resonates with the English of early Bibles in our language. Their beautiful but (for us) archaic poetics in English–Coverdale, Tyndale, Geneva, King James–reflecting that of ancient biblical texts that stretch back in their own archaic memory to Moses c. 1,500 b.c., comes from the same era as Shakespeare’s exploration of the spiritual unity of humanity. It was a time when vernacular but literary English bloomed. Often such archaic but poetic English is preferred in American Orthodox liturgical uses of Holy Scripture, because of its deep affect.

On a poetic level, St. Nikolai of Ohrid, in an essay reflecting on Shakespeare from an Orthodox Christian perspective, called the insight of the Bard’s archaic English into the oneness of human nature “pananthropos.” That’s what we Russian Orthodox Christians might also call sobornost, a catholicity that is not so much spatial as spiritual solidarity.

Sometimes on civil New Year’s we can pause and remember the power of remembrance to which “Auld Lang Syne” points us in its own “archaic” Scots, a disappearing dialect today. Like New Year’s, it can remind us both of mortality and what endures.

When we sing “Memory eternal” as a prayer for departed Orthodox Christians, we ask that God may remember them as He remembered the Wise Thief on the Cross long ago, who indeed is remembered at every Orthodox Liturgy in our Pre-Communion prayer.

That God may remember us is praying that, despite all our sins (in which I am worst), in His love for us, He may remember the spark of His love in our hearts that we struggle to keep kindled and nurtured, the uncreated light of His we seek to let shine. We struggle in that divine grace to empty ourselves in Him rather than to assert ourselves, and pray that He remembers our beloved friends and us.

Part of the prayer “memory eternal” also can be understood also as a plea that we may remember those who have loved and who are departed as well, that they be remembered in the prayers of the living in the living tradition of the Church.

For our Lord gave us His new commandment, to love one another as He loves us, that is to love our neighbor more than ourselves through our emptying ourselves in God’s love.

To remember friends in this way is also to remember how Jesus is, as our dismissal prayers in Church note, “the lover of mankind,” and counts us in the Body of Christ as His friends.

So as the civil New Year in global media culture hit tonight from New Zealand all the way to us in the Eastern United States, we can reflect on remembrance as Orthodox Christians.

I remember linking arms to sing the song at Burns birthday parties long ago in Chicago and in Champaign, Illinois, and for a time in our college town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, at the old Highlands Pub in a yearly gathering I helped organize, when our civil society was less uncivil even locally.

Even civil New Year’s can be a time of struggle underneath the celebration, an awareness of mortality and time passing, or desperate efforts to forget the same, or both. A time of pressure to be loved and with someone special, when that is not always the case or even possible.

For example, I recall one very dark New Year’s on the streets of Chicago late at night years ago. Yet that dark night of loneliness became, with God’s help, part of the spiritual journey that led me unwilling and unworthy still into the Orthodox Church and the family with whom I mark New Year’s tonight, and that is a memory redeemed.

There are deep civilizational memories and poetics, too, in the boundaries we mortals try to set on time, such as New Year’s Eve marked by singing Auld Lang Syne. Although we hit 2026 just now on the civil calendar (which submerged represents an inaccurate calculation from Jesus’ birth now often obscured as the year of the “Common Era”), in Chinese civilization we’re in the year 4772. In many Islamic lands it’s 1446. On the Jewish Calendar 5786.

But “civilizational” rituals of time can be absurd. A disco ball dropped in a town north of us here in the central Susquehanna Valley at midnight, in Williamsport, but a beaver (artificial) dropped in a town southwest of us, appropriately named Beavertown, for New Year’s. In Times Square in New York City those wanting to observe the New Year were advised to wear adult diapers (sold by many street vendors) because the crowd would be so densely packed and there would be no way out for urgent bathroom breaks. Then after midnight, the new socialist mayor of New York City is sworn in on a Koran in abandoned subway stop; attendees at the public block party would complain about a lack of facilities, music, and food for celebrating. China had a New Year’s Eve light, fireworks and music show at the Great Wall, which seemed more civilized or at least better organized.

But here on a snowy night in American Northern Appalachia, in which the Great Wall and Times Square seem equally distant, we marked New Year’s Eve at our little country Church chanting the Akathist for the Holy Protection of the Mother of God with candles lit, in an ancient Orthodox Christian service dating back to the vanished Byzantine civilizational zone. Linking time to God’s everlasting, typed by the linking of arms while singing “Auld Lang Syne,” helps us mortals always and forever, unto ages of ages.

Indeed, for us Russian Orthodox Christians, hearkening back to the roots of our faith in Christian Byzantium continued in the Third Rome of spiritual tradition, on our Orthodox Christian calendar it is 7534. That stems from ancient calculations of the inspired chronography of Holy Scripture, formed by Church Tradition, since the days of Adam and Eve.

Orthodox Christian New Year’s will come again Sept. 1 when, if the Lord does not return in the meantime, we will mark 7535. But, on our calendar, that new year will come on Sept. 14 on the civil calendar, because our sacred calendar differs–in fact “Old Civil New Year” in Russia is still remembered on January 14. So, too, Appalachian folklore still remembers “Old Christmas” and “Old New Year’s.” The distinct sensibility of our sacred calendar marks in part a resistance to what the Irish Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Machine,” a global chronology set in motion by industrialization and the British Empire, with its focal origin in Greenwich Mean Time and railroad time charts.

At this time when time is on our mind, we can remember how God’s time–also His beyond-time of remembering–is a beautiful mystery involving remembrance, for He is “beyond non-being” as St. Dionysius put it, even while His uncreated activity or grace engages us here in our time. This is why, in the biggest example, the Church is both historical and spiritual at the same time.

The Church Fathers considered simultaneous dimensions of (1) natural time (such as the seasons and the time of animals and plants), (2) human time (our social and technological calculations of time zones, calendars, and now digital time), and (3) eternity–created also, but for the human soul, saints and angels (as well as demons) not ending. Then there is (4-uber) the everlasting of God, beyond time, which we cannot understand, but metaphorically might be seen as a tapestry. He views and engages from a different dimension, analogous perhaps to the folding of time and space in quantum physics, but infinitely beyond.

Looking to the beyond-time of God’s love, we ask His remembrance for those faithful who repose, we hope for others and ourselves as sinners prayerfully, and through His uncreated grace we seek to let good memories shine through us for our light to shine, in 2026 and beyond in 7534.

We may sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve and remember our friends, including, if we only knew better, our enemies who spiritually are our friends, and those in need, whom we don’t know or haven’t bothered to get to know and care for yet, although we need them, too.

It’s a reminder that the “kindness” mentioned in the song comes from the same root as “kin,” and that we are all kin in Adam and Eve and in the family of Noah. And the “cup of kindness” mentioned in secular terms in the song, in an infinitely deeper way types for Orthodox Christians the Chalice at the Eucharist, the cup from which we participate in our Lord’s most precious Holy Body and Blood.

Friends may betray us, as the Gospel warns. But friendship is a word whose ancient root is related to “free,” indicating how the generosity inherent in friendship, as exemplified for us by Jesus, goes deeper than superficial ties, and how the spiritual solidarity of sobornost in Christ frees us.

May God this year give us blessed remembrance, including friends known and unknown—human, eternal, and most of all Divine, Jesus Christ–in moments of His beautiful grace that melt our boundaries of time.