For everything there is a season. The well-known verses from Ecclesiastes were even turned into a well-known popular song in the 1960's, adapted by the rock musician Peter Seeger from the King James text of this passage from the Bible. This song became a popular peace anthem in the 1960s. I remember singing this song in music class at George B Armstrong Elementary School in Chicago.
What can we, as people of faith, make of these beautiful, poetic words that are so familiar to us? God has appointed different times and seasons in the way our world functions. The seasons are a part of the natural order of things. Our eternal God is beyond the temporality of the world, even though we live in a world of change. In fact, Father Vincent McNally, the Church history professor I had in seminary, used to commonly say that death and change were the only constants in our world. And, if we look at the changes we go through in our faith life, how our life of faith is constantly evolving and changing as we continue on our journey of faith, we can appreciate how much change is so much a part of the world and our lives, just like the changing of the seasons. With the tumultuous changes our country and our world are going through, changes that are accompanied by worry and uncertainty, we are very familiar with the changes that characterize so much of our lives.
Yet, in the midst of change, God is always with us. As we remember the poetic words of Ecclesiastes, of the different changes, seasons, and challenges that are a part of our lives and of our worldly existence, may we put our trust in God, who is all-knowing, omnipresent, and omniscient.
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