Orbis Books
For Everything a Season
For Everything a Season
Through the famous verses of Ecclesiastes, Joan Chittister reflects on timeless themes: the purpose and value of human life, the balance of joy and sorrow, work and rest, love and loss. In meditating on the contrasting seasons of our lives, she shows how human fulfillment and true happiness come, not from getting and having more and more, but from knowing and valuing what we have. Friendship and laughter, patience and sorrow, humility and compassion, from birth through death all these are God's gifts to us, the precious moments of life itself.
What Readers Say...
"Sister Joan Chittister presents us with fruitful reading for our spiritually impoverished times."
—Notker Wolf, OSB, past Abbot Primate of the Benedictine Order
Reader Resources
Read an Excerpt
We can’t cage life. We cannot freeze the present happy day under glass. We can’t impale it like a butterfly in a frame. No, life moves inexorably on, whether we go with it or not. It rocks and lurches and limps along. It reels from high to low at a pace often too wild to follow, sometimes slow to bear.
The myth of life lived on an even keel persists in the minds of many, but seduces only the weak of heart. Life is a growing thing going from seed to sapling, from pillar to post, hither and yon, forwards and backwards but always, always toward its purpose, the shaping of the self into a person of quality, compassion, and joy. For that to happen, every smallest segment must be faced and cannot be fled. Life is not controllable; it is only doable.
Therefore, the keeping of the beat of life, the getting to the marrow of each of its measures, all of its elements is what the dance of life is really about. Who has lived well? Those who have sucked the juice of life from every period of its growing. Who is the happy person? Those who have survived each of these elements and found themselves to be more human, more wise, more kindly, more just, more flexible, more integrated because of having lived through that period of time, that moment of definition, that phase of survival, that streak of chastening awareness
No doubt about it, the cycle of time shapes and reshapes our misshapen selves until we have the opportunity to become what we can.
Discussion Questions
Engage in meaningful discussions, think critically, and explore deeper insights with these thought-provoking questions.
Awards
1996 Catholic Press Association, First Place Book Award