A version of this post first appeared in Vol. 206 of Light Reading, our weekly email newsletter. If you would like to receive messages like this every Sunday, please send an email to info@christinst.org.
Today is Father's Day, and with its emphasis on things like barbecue, baseball and fishing, it can feel like the unofficial start of summer. Still, the beginning of summer probably doesn't mean as much to us now as it did when we were schoolkids; if you had that experience and expectation, summer was a special time, separate from the rest of the year. Perhaps you even looked forward to it all year, and it probably felt like it took forever to reach.
When did we stop thinking of summer as distinct? When did the seasons blend into “the year,” an amorphous blob of time punctuated by holidays? When did we start treating days like a straight line, barreling toward some eventual end? We know that is not true intellectually. We know it's not true instinctively. One only need pick up a calendar to be reminded of it. The months tumble into each other, of course, but altogether they form a pattern that we recognize in an instant: damp and growing, to hot and active, to dry and cooling, to cold and sleeping, before waking up again.
Time is neither a blob nor an unbroken line, but a rhythmic process of rising and falling and rising. The ancients knew that intimately, and they expressed it in their mythologies, the frameworks they used to comprehend and commune with the cosmos. Interestingly, they often tied the seasons to cardinal directions, spatial forces tied to temporal ones, holding the world in place across time and space, and mapping out the complex of its pattern.
For example, in ancient Greece and Rome, the personification of summer, Theros, was depicted as the wind, Notos, one of the four direction wind gods. In Chinese tradition—picked up in Daoist thought and translated to Japan—directions and seasons, among other things, were governed by mythical beasts that were arranged along cardinal points. Pueblo folklore perceived the changing of the seasons through an agreement between Miochin, the spirit of summer who brought corn from the south, and his nemesis Shakok, the spirit of winter who brought snow from the north. All these elements existed in tandem with each other, as steady as the seasons came and went, as surely as the arrows on the compass formed opposing points on a balanced beam.
In the Hebrew Bible, the language is more expansive. The book of Ecclesiastes ties the passing of seasons not just to planting and harvesting, or even to birth and death, but also to simple tasks like sewing and huge jobs like construction, moments of joy and bouts of sadness, even how to conduct oneself—when to speak up and when to stay silent.
We can ignore it or complain about it, but we can't stop summer or winter from coming, any more than we can stop them from returning again next year. In the same way, we all feel a little happiness sometimes, we all feel a little sting, and we will again and again as part of the human experience. Seasons and sentiments, things individual and cosmic, all travel forward in sequence, like the crests and troughs of a wave. And just like a wave, the more we fight against that pattern, the greater resistance and so more turbulence we feel. Those who combat nature and bully their way through life end up destroying their environments and shattering themselves. On the other hand, those who align themselves harmoniously with the patterns of life find within those moments of heights and depths inner peace.
Those of us with spiritual perspective recognize not just the rhythm of life but also the conductor behind it. The presence of God is in the pattern, driving it toward its final goal. What is that goal? It is to achieve the good—harmony, unity, peace, completion. It is the goodness that was in the beginning and is now and will be again; the goodness that Paul said we know exists for those who love God, even in the trials of life. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Paul's proclamation to the Roman church is that he states all thing work together for good for those called according to God's purpose, which means those God foreknew, those destined to be in the image of Christ. But if it refers to everyone God foreknew, who is not included in that number? Who lacks purpose in God's pattern? We are all invited to live in the image of Christ—to take on Christ mind, Christ behavior, Christ identity. We are all invited to experience the good that God, over seasons and years and lifetimes, ultimately brings.
Life is not always great, but it's not always an amorphous slog either. It's not any one thing but instead a complex pattern, like an engaging melody, which we are all invited to hear and learn and play. We can feel the presence and purpose of God within its pulse; we are free to realize the truth of ourselves within its rising and falling, its descent and ascent, a pattern from which our identity and destiny emerge, become clear to us, are realized to be good, and bring us back to the Godhead.
Let us pray:
Dear God,
Thank You that life goes on,
And that there is purpose in its step.
Thank You for the turning of the Earth,
The changing of the seasons,
The passing of time, both terrible and beautiful.
Thank You for Your comforting presence,
Written into its pattern,
There tomorrow and the next day and the next,
Waiting for us, whenever we are able to perceive it so.
Amen.
“Life follows the path of evolution and involution. It comes from the Godhead and returns to the Godhead. It is the spontaneous and inevitable universal exhaling and inhaling of the Spirit of Life.”
- Hanna Jacob Doumette, “The Sun of Higher Understanding”