Nunc Coepi: Are You Late for Your Own Life?
The secret to bridging the gap between who you are and who you want to be
“And I said: now I begin (Nunc Coepi); this is the change of the right hand of the Most High.”
— Psalm 77:10 (Vulgate)
There are days when you wake already late for your own life.
Before you’ve even opened your eyes, the noise has started — the emails, the worries, the low-grade self-critique. You think, I was supposed to be different by now — more centred, more prayerful, more of whatever it was I once hoped for in God. But here I am again: tired, doom-scrolling, trying to find the will to be different, to remember why I wanted to be different, and wondering what happened to my commitment to change.
That’s the psychological moment where most of us give up — the delay between the self we hoped to be and the one who actually showed up. Our brains hate that gap. We feel the dissonance and call it failure. We hit what psychologists call a delay gap—the moment when our internal ideal (who we wanted to be) collides with our actual experience (who we are right now).
The brain feels dissonance.
The instinct is to close this gap by avoidance: give up, numb out, find something easier. So we retreat — into distraction, overwork, Netflix, TikTok (choose your preferred social media drug), doom-scrolling — anything to hide the ache of being not there yet.
The spiritual life isn’t the absence of that distance; it’s learning what to do when you feel it. Psalm 77:11 - Nunc Coepi. Now I begin. Not “when I feel holy.” Not “once I get it together.” Just — now. From this exact disappointment.
This gap is precisely the threshold moment—where discouragement is closest to discovery. That gap is the threshold, and the doorway grace is standing in.
If we can stay there, if we can resist the guilt and shame of “I should be further along by now,” something sacred happens. The noticing itself becomes the beginning. The very recognition that I am not where I want to be means awareness has returned. The light is on again, and God is so very near.
Origins of Nunc Coepi
Nunc Coepi is Latin for “Now I begin.”
It comes from the old Latin translation of Psalm 77. In the Hebrew text, the psalmist says, “This is my grief — that the right hand of the Most High has changed.” But when St Jerome translated the psalms into Latin, he heard something different in the Greek: a shift, a turning. “And I said: now I begin (Nunc Coepi); this is the change wrought by the right hand of the Most High.”
That phrase — Nunc Coepi — took root in the Church. The saints carried it like a coin in their pockets.
So Nunc Coepi isn’t about starting over from scratch; it’s about starting again from here. It’s a way of saying, “Even this moment — especially this one — can be the first step of grace.”
The Moment of Noticing
Nunc Coepi—“Now I begin.”
One of the reasons the saints still move us is their growth — their lived, tangible experience of God. We imagine they got there by being better at faith than we are — steadier, holier, more disciplined.
But they weren’t. They were just like us.
The difference was what they did with the gap — that aching distance between who they were and who they longed to be.
They didn’t give up. They began again.
That’s the Ignatian move: the refusal to dramatise the drift. You notice you’re off course; you begin again. You fall asleep in prayer; you wake and begin again. You overreact, regret it, and — begin again. You watch your once-fierce and firm convictions fade, your discipleship lose momentum — and still, you begin again.
You fail — in a hundred small, forgettable ways, or maybe in one spectacular, unforgettable one — and still, you begin again. Because of where you are. Despite where you are. That’s the grace of it.
The noticing is already the turning.
The danger is that we interpret that moment of awareness as the end of something: the collapse of resolve, the evidence we’ve failed again. But the saints knew better. The moment you wake up inside your own distance is not the end of devotion — it’s the start of it.
Francis de Sales whispered Nunc Coepi every time he stumbled. Ignatius built it into the muscle-memory of the soul: begin again, begin again, begin again. The practice isn’t about perfection; it’s about participation. It is the prayer of the tired heart that has learned, finally, that failure is not the end of prayer but its beginning.
To say Nunc Coepi is to stand in the ruins of your good intentions and breathe. It’s to trust that God isn’t waiting at the finish line but standing in the debris saying, “Good. You’ve noticed. Now let’s start here.”
A Prayer of Nunc Coepi
Lord, here and now, I begin again.
Not from strength, but from grace.
Not from what I have achieved, but from what You have done.
When I look back, I see my faltering steps,
but when I look to You, I see mercy waiting.
In this moment, O God, I start anew —
in trust, in love, in surrender.
Take my past and transform it,
take my future and guide it,
take my present and fill it with Your light.
Teach me, Lord, to begin again and again,
until my whole life becomes one unbroken “yes” to You.
Nunc coepi.
Now I begin.
Amen.
I can't begin to tell you how deeply encouraging reading this has been to me. Thank you.
Thank you Jason! Worthy of participation in, and of sharing this with others… bless you!