"There is a season"

“. . .that brings forth fruit in its season. . .” Psalm 1:3

If I hear nothing more than a phrase from Ecclesiastes 3 (“For everything there is a season. . .”), my mind spins an old record by The Byrds, a late ‘60s rock group, and I hear those famous verses set to the music of the a Pete Seeger tune titled “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

Correction. Maybe I should say, my heart plays that tune because the energy that spins that vinyl originates deeper in my psyche than my mind. My heart remembers; my heart weds “Turn, Turn, Turn” to flower children and the anti-war movement. In a second, I feel a joyful, lilting nostalgia—my music, my history, my past. Peace signs, bell-bottoms, and flower power bring back the whole era. I feel free at last, thank God a’mighty.

That particular song continues to thrill me, I think, because in the tightly Christian world of my own teenage years, “Turn, Turn, Turn” was the closest thing I knew to a hymn from the music of my world. It used a biblical text after all, and therefore reminded the rebel I was that the Bible itself says there’s a time for war and a time for peace.

And maybe this is a time for peace, I told my parents back then, who were hawks. You’re wrong about rock music, wrong about Nixon, and wrong about Vietnam.

That’s where the conversation ended, time and time again, and I went up to my room, turned up the volume, and played that song once more.

It really is nuts. I get goosebumps from “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

But I’m older now, and I understand there’s more to that series of verses in Ecclesiastes than some anti-war rant. That memorable chapter isn’t just hippie doctrine, the Bible’s own manifesto that everything is cool—how did that other song go?—"everything is beautiful in its own way."
  Ecclesiastes is counter-cultural, but it’s not just for bell-bottoms.

This single clause from Psalm 1:3 is a reminder that, sure, everything is legit, but only within its time. “There is a season,” after all, just as there is not a season. There’s good timing and there’s bad timing.

That man or woman who is blessed, the poet/king says here, 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. I don’t think I was ever arguing for propriety back then, more like “fruit-basket-upset.”

Order is somehow blessed, it seems, if we believe Ecclesiastes 3 and Psalm 1. Chaos is anathema; even though when I say that, in the context of the late ‘60s, I sound as schoolmarm-ish as my parents did to me. It’s worth noting that the Byrds’ only other hit was “Eight Miles High,” a celebration of hallucinogenic drug use.

But then again, maybe what the Bible says about propriety here resonates a bit more harmonically in the mind of a man who is as old as I am, someone who, several years ago already, began to really like staying home at night. Maybe blessedness-as-order is as comfortable as bedroom slippers to a man who looks forward to the long breath one blessedly takes when those absolutely darling grandchildren finally go home.

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

But I got it here somewhere yet—that old album. I really ought to spin it again. It’s a joy. And there’s a time for that too.