Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time
It’s a little difficult for me to read the first lesson (Ecclesiastes 3:1-11) without also hearing Pete Seeger’s song “Turn, Turn, Turn” in my head, because his song is a very faithful rendition of verses 1 through 8, in pretty much exact translation. Seeger added only six words to those verses, including the “Turn! Turn! Turn!” refrain. The emphasis in this song is on cultivating world peace, and so the lines focus on those aspects of the first eight verses that relate to peace. (The Byrds' Rendition of Turn!Turn!Turn!)
For sure, the first eight verses are poetic and catchy, easy to remember. If we look at the first eight verses alone, we might get a sense that humans have a lot of control over the world and over their individual daily lives. But it is the last three verses, the ones not in the song, that caught my eye this week, and that have more overall importance for Christians than the first eight because they are proclaiming that God is ultimately in control.
“What advantage has the worker from his toil?” asks the author of Ecclesiastes. Toil is a favorite word of this author; he spends most of Ecclesiastes pondering the meaning of work, and the ups and downs of life. He asks questions we might well be asking ourselves in our own time: “Is the daily grind worth it, or is it meaningless?” Ecclesiastes’ author knows well the constant hamster-wheel feeling of getting up in the morning, doing the routine, putting in the hours at work, coming home to fix supper, tuck in the kids and maintain the house, only to do it all over again the next day.
In this passage, the author suggests that humans think they have some control over time or at least over the daily tasks that must be done, but the author insists instead that it is God “who has made everything appropriate to its time.” God is the one to whom we should “turn” in all the ups and downs of life, so the author seems to be reminding us that God is not someone to whom we turn only at crisis moments in our lives.
It is the very last bit of this that I find most significant though: God has “put the timeless in their hearts, without man’s ever discovering from beginning to end what God has done.” The funny thing is that the author himself could not have written these words without somehow coming to know what God has done, that God did put something timeless in his heart. The author is therefore trying to tell us something about God that we would miss if we are only focusing on the day-to-day toil and rhythm of our lives as mentioned in verses 1 through 8. We need to learn to recognize the “timeless,” which is God. We need to learn to recognize the presence of God in our lives. This takes time away from all those busy tasks that fill up our days. It takes a commitment to spending time with God, even amid the birthing, the dying, the planting, the seeking, the mourning, the speaking, and the silence. God is present in all and through all.
Note that this theme comes up again in the gospel reading (Luke 9:18-22). Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is. And it turns out that Jesus’ identity is hidden, but the one who has taken the time to be with Jesus has discovered his true identity.
Today, let us take the time to be with Jesus and rest in his presence. Can we even try to see God’s presence in the midst of our very busy days?
- Jana M. Bennett