Readings: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11; Psalm 144; Luke 9:18-22
“For everything there is a season: there is a time for everything under heaven.”
The first reading from Ecclesiastes is often used in Memorial Services and Funeral Liturgies. In these months of the pandemic, families have chosen this as a favourite reading. I have heard this reading over and over again. And I wonder: is it because of a certain resignation to the pandemic, a sense of helplessness. Or is there something deeper? We often childishly think that we have unlimited time to know family and friends and to experience fully their love. So, we become complacent, we get comfortable putting off the chance to tell them how much we love them, what they meant to us. We squander the time we could have used telling them how grateful we are for their presence in our life. After their passing we struggle to remember their faces, the way they walked, what we loved most about them. And with time, even those memories pass away. Why? Because memories are also accessible only through the generosity of time. We constantly check our watches, acutely aware of time. We constant ask, “Is it time yet?” “When will it be my turn?” We need things done at specific times, we want painful times to pass quickly and pleasant times to last forever. We think we are in control. Young people feel that if they do not get married by a certain age it will never happen. How about people who say specific prayers for a special number of days with the hope that their requests will be answered at the end of those days. All as if we can make God do what we ask before it is time for that request to become a reality if, in fact, it is even meant to be. Regardless of what we do to control our lives, everything happens when it is time. We will live, and we die. All in good time……all in God’s time. What would it be like to stop looking at our watches, to just know that there will be a time for everything to be brought to light, a time when we come to realize that all that is meant to happen in our lives has its own time? When we rest in that knowledge, we become free from worry: then we have time to take pleasure in the timelessness of God’s love for us. Blessings, Fr. Brian