To Everything There Is a Season

Years ago, when I started this exercise in vanity (in all its senses) I had no idea if anyone would read it. That was before the Twitterverse and when Facebook was largely the realm of college students. Before Nooks and Kindles and IPads. When I still got my newspaper in paper form.

But people did read it, and some of them became my friends. And some of my friends read it too. Over the course of the last year, however, I seemed to run out of things to say. Or at least things I could say outside the safe space of my spiritual director’s office. It largely became the place that I posted the sermons I preached at St.Martin’s in the Fields Episcopal Church in Forest Acres, a wonderfully diverse community of faith that stood as a bulwark against the narrow divisions of left and right, conservative and liberal. And then, I just had to choose silence while my personal life careened out of control. My marriage ended, my kids were gone, my house suddenly empty and quiet. Silence seemed to be a course of both wisdom and necessity.

As the ancient Hebrew poet once wrote:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

And so it is again, a time to speak. Perhaps this time, no one will read it, having decided that I had wandered away and wouldn’t be back. If you’ve stumbled here whether accidentally or by choice, I hope something I say can be useful to you in this new season.