Daily Reflection for Friday, September 25, 2020
Peace and Blessings, Friends and Parishioners!
We encourage you to reflect on Friday’s readings at this link:
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/092520.cfm
If you prefer to use your own Bible, the readings are:
First Reading: Ecclesiastes 3: 1-11
Responsorial: Psalm 144: 1B, 2ABC, 3-4
Gospel: Luke 9: 18-22
Our reflection on Friday’s readings:
There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for everything under the heavens….
He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without man’s ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has done. Ecclesiastes 3: 1, 11
It is not possible for me to read Ecclesiastes 3 without thinking of the folk-rock song, “Turn, Turn, Turn” by The Byrds. It became a #1 hit song in 1965, a year that included Bloody Sunday, the marches led by John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery; riots in Watts, California; the end of the Second Vatican Council; protests against the American war in Vietnam by the Catholic Worker Movement and college campuses in the U.S.
It was a time of great change and turmoil and more was on the way. And, like much of the 60s, it was a time to ask questions and seek answers.
As Fr. Richard Rohr writes:
It is said that asking good questions is a sign of intelligence. But Western culture has spent centuries admiring and promoting people who supposedly have all the answers—which, too often, they have read or heard from someone else.
Fr. Rohr quotes Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) who wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet:
I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves. . .. For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer.*
Like the decade of the 60s, we are living in a time of great change and turmoil. And as much as I want answers and clarity, I also need to live through this time and live into the answers. And living into the answers needs prayer, study and action.
Oh Lord, as I experience turmoil and confusion, please guide me. Help me to find the tools wisdom and guidance and please guide my actions so that I can help build your kingdom.
Peace and blessings,
Al Mytty