Sunday Morning Meds--"for every season"

“. . .that brings forth fruit in its season. . .” Psalm 1

If I hear only a phrase from Ecclesiastes 3 (“For everything there is a season. . .”), my mind spins a record by The Byrds, a late 60s rock group, and I hear those famous verses set to the music of the old Pete Seeger tune.

 

Correction.  Maybe I should say, my heart that plays “Turn, Turn, Turn,” because I’m sure that the energy that spins that rock classic originates somewhere deeper in my psyche than reason alone. In my heart the song will forever be wedded to flower children and the anti-war movement—and, inescapably, my own story.

That’s probably why I feel a kind of joyful liberation, an odd, lilting nostalgia when my memory dances to that tune--it’s my music that’s playing, not my parents’. My music used a legitimate biblical text that was right there in God’s holy Word. “Look it up,” I might have said, defiantly, to my parents.  “It’s in the Bible.”

I don’t recall ever having such a fight, although I remember my God-fearing parents’ grousing about the rock music that blared (sometimes defiantly) from my stereo.

 

But what’s in my memory runs deeper than the issue of rock music. What the song did with a biblical text was build legitimacy for my own anti-war sentiment.  After all, the Bible (!) says there is a time for war and a time for peace.  Maybe this is a time for peace.  Maybe my parents are wrong about rock music and wrong about Nixon and wrong about Vietnam, I told myself, spinning that tune again and again.

But there’s more to that series of verses, more than liberation because there’s also law and order. What the passage announces is not simply that everything is legit, but that everything is legit only within its time.  "There is a season," after all.  There’s good timing and bad timing.

 

Ecclesiastes 3 and Psalm 1 appear to agree, don't you think? That man or woman who is blessed, the poet says, will—and you can count on this—bring forth fruit in his season.  Which is to say, at the right time, when it’s right for him or her to bear exactly the kind of fruit he or she should be bearing.  This isn’t “fruit-basket-upset."

"In his season" suggests that chaos will wear you out, that order is somehow blessed. Within the gala context of the hippies and bell-bottoms, the promise of fruit at the “proper” time sounds almost schoolmarm-ish.  It doesn’t sound like the mantra of a rock group whose only other lasting contribution was “Eight Miles High,” a celebration of the glories of hallucinogenic drugs.

Then again, maybe this verse’s intent is shifting in the mind of a man who, at 70 years old rather likes staying home at night.  Maybe blessedness-as-order is as comfortable as bedroom slippers on a man who appreciates the long cleansing breath one takes once the grandchildren have left.

 

For everything, after all, there is a season. Like fruit that way, I guess.