A Time for Everything (Eccl 3:1-11)

“There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for everything under the heavens” we read in today’s first reading, Eccl 3: 1-11.  How difficult for us to comprehend the Wisdom of God. I don’t understand, for instance,  why my mother was taken from the family when four of my siblings were still in grade school and I was still a teenager. I don’t understand why evil persists in the world, why men and women struggle desperately and still face foreclosures; why children, adolescents and young adults are kidnapped and sold into the sex slave, drugged and raped. I don’t understand why women, many times, are treated like second class citizens, less than male counterparts, in the world and in the church when Jesus did not treat women that way.  I don’t understand why earthquakes, famines, hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires and other natural disasters strike so often.  Perhaps the answer is in the reason God was crucified, tortured and made subject to death. That seems senseless, too, to a faithless heart.  Faith tells us, however, that Jesus’ death was the key to life, eternal life, salvation and a restoration of our relationship with God and  one another. Time takes on infinite meaning in the Timeless One. So all those things I don’t understand contain the Seed of Timelessness, the Seed that will bear new life in time.  In all the incomprehensible facts of life,  God’s work is being accomplished with us not knowing, most of the time (cf.  Eccl 3:1-11).  As Soren Kirkegaard  once said: Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.  And how challenging it is to live with life’s mysteries, especially the mysteries of our faith and the mystery of persistent injustices in the world and in the church, especially  among men and women who profess to be following the way Jesus modeled for us.