A Rocky Year Ahead…

The clock is ticking on 2021, leaving nearly 11 months, 47 weeks, and 332.5 days until we can look back and judge if this year measured up to our expectations.  Of one thing we can be sure:  during the ensuing 478,800 of its minutes we will experience most if not all of the following:

·      Birth and death

·      Planting and uprooting

·      Killing and healing

·      Tearing down and building up

·      Weeping and laughing

·      Mourning and dancing

·      Embracing and not embracing

·      Searching and giving up

·      Keeping and throwing away

·      Tearing and mending

·      Being silent and speaking

·      Loving and hating

·      Making war and ensuring peace

How do I know this?  Because, as Qoheleth, the self-named author of Ecclesiastes concluded after listing life’s contrasting circumstances, “there is nothing new under the sun.”  Could it be that human experience, painted on the backdrop of constantly changing historical events, has nonetheless remained rather constant?  My reading of the residue of human memory preserved for us in literature, history and art overflows with stories of passion, insecurity, greed, cruelty and virtue, the very stuff that today’s media delivers to us every day via print, television, and on social platforms.  When it comes to human nature, in any millennium we look, there is “Nothing new…”  Pete Seeger and The Byrds must have thought so too as they turned, turned, turned this biblical wisdom into folk-rock gold in the ‘60s. 

Those sharp of eye may notice that my bulleted list left out one oppositional pair from the original text:  “there is a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.” (Ecclesiastes 3:5a)   I did so to highlight what I once heard in a sermon that took this half-stanza from the Bible and drew from it this maxim:

Everyday life gives us stones; what we do with them is up to us.

There is no doubt that we will both gather and cast away stones in 2021 because stones will appear in our path EVERYDAY!   That is as true for us in the golden days of our youth as it is when we wear the mantle of age.  It is as certain for us who can claim to be learned as it is for those schooled in hard knocks.   Whether we’ve been favored by status or marginalized in society, it remains a fact of our living.  Stones can and will come our way, all shapes and sizes of them, presenting us with all manner of challenges and opportunities this year.    Figuratively and literally, in each and every one of days we will be given…

·      Boulders that obstruct our path;

·      Sand grains that irritate our eyes;

·      Gravel that invades our shoes, bringing us discomfort;

·      Pebbles sized just right to kick, collect, skip over water or throw in anger;

·      Rocks suitable for building walkways, shelters, bridges, or walls;

·      Gems of shape and color we will want to treasure or wear as adornments;

·      Even stones that cause us agony when harbored in our bellies—how galling!

Everyday life gives us stones.  If stones seem ill suited to be called gifts, you may prefer to say that life presents us, surrounds us, or lays in our path stony situations that determine the course of our days. We typically refer to these by other names: crises, anxieties, needy or demanding people, unexpected disasters, and even some unanticipated blessings.  Few if any do we choose and most we do not welcome.  Yet all of them vie for our attention, redirecting our plans and recalibrating our priorities, while stirring the cauldron of our emotions, often to the detriment of our health.  My own faith labors to understand where stones fit in God’s providence.   Are they the implements of his testing or the projectiles of his judgment?  Does God’s amazing grace conceal a stony arsenal held in the ready for those needing to be humbled or polished?

I think not.  My theology wrestles with any characterization of God’s will or nature that seems inconsistent with Divine Grace.  A God who distributes stones too easily mimics my own worst temperaments, my own insecure desires for retribution and cruelty.    A God whose most authentic attribute is LOVE is not in the geology business, neither casting them nor gathering them against us.  It is life, not God, that gives us stones.  Stones are a necessary part of the landscape in which we live, move, and have our being in this universe where free will and spontaneity define our possibilities as well as our responsibilities.   Yes life gives us, all of us, stones.  Not God.

If life’s stones are not heaven-sent, they do, nonetheless, reveal a great deal about who we are.  For what we do with them—these stones that are part of living--is up to us.  We hold the power, the responsibility, for what we do with stones.  We and we alone are the ones who can choose to ignore them, pick them up, covet them, use them to build walls or bridges or forge them into weapons.  And to the degree that we open our own hearts to God’s abiding presence, and try to align our wills with God’s, we discover that God does help us overcome life’s stones, or live with them, or leave them lying on the road. 

Today is February 2nd, for some a Punxsutawney harbinger of what may lie ahead. More importantly it offers the first glimpses of another month in which all of Qoheleth’s contrasting realities will define the course of our minutes, hours and days yet to be lived.  Every step we take will carry us over rocky ground, and stones will be our constant companions. What we do with them, how we manage them, and what lasting impact they will have on the quality of our living—is and will remain, up to us.