27 September 2024 - Friday of the 27th week of Ordinary Time - St Vincent DePaul - Ecclesiastes 3:1-11

Our first reading today - Ecclesiastes in Greek or Qoheleth in Hebrew -  is a part of the Wisdom tradition of literature in Israel’s scriptures. It is a common reading in funeral liturgies, since it is about a wise person reflecting upon different times in his life: times of death and birth, times of killing and healing, times of weeping and laughing. There are times and seasons in the way nature and ecology functions. There are times and seasons in our lives. While each time and season may seem to happen randomly, the underlying significance of this reading is that there is a divine purpose for everything that happens. We are reminded of the sovereignty of God, the creator and ruler of heaven and earth. We human beings learn during our lifetime that there are many things beyond our human control. We may have a smart phone in our pockets that is more powerful than the computers that put the man on the moon. We may have advanced technology that many of our us could not have imagined as children. But there are many elements of our existence that are beyond our control. We cannot conquer time. God appoints each moment. Our lives here on earth are a mixture of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, harmony and struggle, life and death. Each season has an appropriate time in the cycle of life. Nothing stays the same.  

As we hear this wise reading from the Old Testament, we celebrate the feast day of St Vincent de Paul, a very beloved saint in our Catholic faith.  He was a French priest who was born at the end of the 16th century to a humble family of farmers. He was the founder of two important religious congregations in our Catholic Church: the Vincentians and the Daughters of Charity. Both of those congregations reflect their founder’s charism of compassion, humility, and service to the poor. He is also well-known throughout the modern world for the social service organization that was named after him more than 200 years after his birth by students at the University of Paris in the early 19th century: the Society of St Vincent de Paul. May we unite our prayers with the prayers of St Vincent DePaul today.