April 2014 Meditation Follow-up

“Mountain Beauty: Timeless and Deep Over the Millennia” with Janet L. Bohren featuring the poem “The Inexorable Refinement of Time” by Joan Chittister. Audio available here.

 

“The Inexorable Refinement of Time” by Joan Chittister

from For Everything a Season

Plutarch wrote, “Time is the wisest of all counselors.”

The truth is that time is all we really have to work with in life.

It is time that forms us.

Time shapes and sears and bends us to the breaking point.

Time heals and resolves and forms the scar tissue that makes the defeats of life vague memory and the triumphs of life more possible.

Whatever we make of ourselves, we will have made it by the durability we bring to the passage of time.

In adulthood the vibrancy of youth must really shine in us if we are to be happy;

in middle age the accumulation of love must shine in us if we are to be effective;

in old age the residue of experience the Sabbath heart, must shine in us if we are able to be full of soul and ripe with calm.

We must come to understand that God gives over every life to the inexorable refinement of time to see how we shall respond to its elements and what, having borne them, we shall bring to its final form and color in the end.

The season is now. The time is ours.”