Writing a reflection every three months coincides with the changing of the seasons. Six months back I was complaining about winter, but now as I write this we are in the midst of summer. From the back of our house we are blessed with access to a beautiful forty-five minute circular walk that passes first through dense woodland before opening into riverside fields. I walk this circuit often and it now takes on a sort of contemplative rhythm with the changing seasons providing the backdrop. As I write this the fields are now full of corn, in stark contrast to the bareness of this same landscape some six months ago. It is a quiet reminder that change is the ever present feature of our lives.

Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 tells us that ‘for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven’. Pete Seeger took eight verses from this chapter and adding a haunting melody created the iconic song ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’, which took a text from the Bible to the top of the hit parade in 1965. Over the years I have come to love the words of Ecclesiastes, however if we are to look beyond the elegant poetry hoping of finding solutions for our existential problems, easy answers are not forthcoming. The text presents itself as a reflection by an unknown author on what the teacher ‘Qoholet’ had told him about the futility of anything that we might normally rely on to give stability to our lives: everything has its time, and nothing is permanent.

Life so far in the twenty-first century might appear to be echoing Ecclesiastes. From the perspective of my own post war generation it can at times feel as if we are now living in a chaotic ‘post-modern’ world, where much of what we had taken as understood is being routinely rejected. If I am going to be objective however, I am bound to ask is this really new? How for instance did those who had just fought and survived two world wars experience the new ideas brought by my own ‘hippy’ generation? Ecclesiastes is quietly nodding at this point, reminding us that it has all been seen before: “what has been, will be” as “there is nothing new under the sun”. In case we are about to sink into despair the books penultimate verse finally reminds us that there is a simple solution: “Fear God and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone”.

But how? Several centuries later Jesus was asked to clarify which of the commandments was the greatest. No one was particularly surprised when he answered, ‘you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul’, but then he suddenly added that ‘you should love your neighbour as yourself’. In case this wasn’t clear he also elsewhere twice puts it another way, saying ‘you should do to others as you would have them do to yourselves’. We are of course already blessed by a few individuals who do their best to live by these simple rules, but the other day a strange thought suddenly struck me. What would happen if year on year a small percentage of people in every country in the world were to suddenly be motivated to follow that advice and moreover were never to turn back. Well that would certainly be something totally ‘new under the sun’. But then what might our world be like some ten years hence?
Meantime back to reality, and let’s all enjoy what’s left of the summer!

Roderick  Campbell Guion OCDS