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SPRING 2012 NEWSLETTER (click here for entire document)

 

“There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.”
Ecclesiastes 3:1

Dear Friends,

With all due respect to the sacred writer, it sometimes sure doesn’t feel that way for most of us.

Time perceived as a merry-go-round rotating endlessly, the markers – calendar year, Church liturgical year, school year, fiscal year – all seem to be coming and going pretty fast. Not enough time.

And time seen as linear spans – infant, child, youth, adult, senior citizen – is realized faster than we think, and is unchanging, irreversible and we can’t really skip a phase, hold on to a phase or repeat one as hard as we may try. Time passes quickly.

Those aspects of time and our just plain needed busyness will not change.

But as we change the last calendars and begin the new year, it’s an opportunity to re-calibrate our approach to time and take a look at the “appointed times” in our lives, hinted at by markers, and renew our belief in a God of abundance – time enough is all we really need.

And, oh yes, we remember Mary, mother of the Lord who in momentous, troubling, puzzling, mysterious times pondered them in her heart - the memory of God’s faithfulness in her people’s times past, the unfolding of her present time sealed with continuing affirmation, and the future placed peacefully in God’s keeping.

This is quite another take on time, an internal measuring of a sort, that is deep, wide and welcoming, and without a lid.

Best wishes for a blessed New Year, in Christ,

Rev. John D. Keller, O.S.A.
Director, Center for Christian Spirituality