Scripture Reflections
Jesus said, “All that you see here — the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” — Luke 21:6
Daylight Saving Time came to an end a few weeks back and with it an entire horizon of other lights as well — like apple stands along the highways, and final summer-like days, and harvest moons, and that technicolor portion of autumn that makes the season worth having in the first place. Along with Halloween and trick-or-treating, the sealing off of Daylight Saving Time has become a season-ending ritual — as much as Labor Day and the opening of school is for summer and Easter for the season of winter.
The return of Standard Time brings about a different hue upon the hours. Mornings are suddenly brighter, as if pushed into daylight by some anxious timekeeper, and afternoons drag dim and weary so much sooner. It is as if life had skipped a beat during the night, and when the day awakes it is as if nothing is quite the same, as if during the night everything had been dismantled and then reassembled with some of the pieces missing. It is the same life except that it looks different. There is indeed more to turning back the clocks than turning back the clocks.
We take the process of settling in for winter a bit more in earnest after Daylight Saving Time ends. As the cold becomes more daring, the daylight seems to seep out through the season’s cracks more quickly. The frost-bit skeletons of summer’s gardens are pulled and tossed. The citric smell of autumn’s leaves as they crunch beneath our feet brings us to memories of leaf piles long past. Children move to indoor playtime, storm windows are hung or slid down and into place, and preparations are begun for the season of family feasts. Life does settle in, and how we live out the winter is so different.
Yet the turn of the season and its dismantling and reassembling of our lives is but an echo of a much deeper process continually at play within the heart of who we are. We ourselves are dismantled and reassembled.
The truth of the matter is that the white-robed prophet of snickered doom who proclaims that the end is near is right — only the end comes before the end and usually more than once. Our lives do collapse in such cosmic ways that not one stone is left upon another. The end may come with the premature death of someone we love, or it may come with a devasting illness for ourselves. It may take the shape of an unexpected pregnancy in midlife or confrontation of a life collapsed by addiction. Or it may happen slowly as we surrender passion or enthusiasm or dreams of our youth. Then one day we discover that the life we knew is now a different life. What was has been dismantled and reassembled into a new life.
That same rhythm takes place not only in our personal lives but also amid townships and nations. Today we find ourselves watching the global dismantling of nations and governments, of societies and ways of life. Those poor whose safety is threatened by civil violence and those whose land is raped by severe drought, they migrate in search of life’s basics, their existence in upheaval and dismantled. And when they migrate, all too often the stability of the host nation becomes unsettled as those nations seek ways to integrate them into their society. It then becomes a reassembling of life for all as new patterns emerge.
Many in our own nation live with anxiety as traditional forms of government are being dismantled. For some the availability of health care is threatened. For others jobs are being erased. And for others the reliability of food at food pantries is shrinking. All of this, to say nothing yet of AI and what it will bring. For so many a way of life that we have known is fading away.
All too often our lives are dismantled and then reassembled, and sometimes those transitions come with more violence than the end of the world we have come to dread. Indeed, there we come to recognize that we are put to death again and again, forced to confess that whatever the future, it will not be of our own making.
Yet Jesus promised, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” Then we can only trust that we will be refashioned, ultimately recreated into some new creation. It is the story of the divine phoenix rising from the ashes, lived by every human being, and understood by every sister and brother who lives in Christ Jesus.
For Reflection:
Is there a way in which your life is presently being dismantled?
How has this process occurred for you in the past? Has it brought a new way of life with new blessings?
