An article from the Cathedral Times.
In Atlanta, it’s amazing how All Saints Day marks the turning of a season. In our climate, at least, it seems that the weather turns brisk and the leaves turn crisp right at the beginning of November – All Saints Day in the Christian year. This year, of course, we turned our clocks back, too, and left Daylight Savings Time in the past. We turned into a new time!
The Cathedral of St. Philip, like all historic Christian churches, knows how to mark changing times, and especially this one. We know how to turn times. On All Saints Sunday morning, we baptized new Christians into a (contagious!) communion of saints. That afternoon, with the choir singing Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor, we remembered by name those who had died in our wide community in the past year. On the following day, we welcomed the homeless into our cathedral for dinner and for a requiem Eucharist for those who died in the past year homeless in Atlanta. Voices of Hope, a women’s prison choir, sang with us again.
At the same time that we were marking death and new life, our foliage was turning too. Leaves on our driveways needed sweeping every other day. Our temperatures reached frost stages. We wore winter coats in the early morning to work. When we drove back home, the evening was dark.
When Pete Seeger wrote his song, “To Everything There is a Season – Turn, Turn, Turn,” and when the Byrds’ recording of that song reached number one in the pop charts in 1965, it was proclaimed the number one pop song with the oldest lyrics ever! Of course, its lyrics come from the Book of Ecclesiastes:
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”
Even when the autumn brings dark evenings and colder temperatures to our lives, when the world around us begins to look dark and gray, the Cathedral of St. Philip actually prepares to welcome fresh life. We know that, out of death and departure, come life and new arrivals.
So it is, soon, that the Cathedral will welcome new chapter members at our annual parish meeting on December 7. In fact, we will also celebrate a surprise that day – a fresh and new role for someone already among us. Many of us have been working steadily on calling a new priest to our canon staff, too. By the time of the annual parish meeting, we should be able to make public the call of a new Canon for Spirituality and Mission.
Lots of new things! To everything there is a season: turn, turn, turn. As our year turns into fall, and as we observe the communion of saints, we turn to a new season. We know that Christ is making all things new, even in the midst of what looks like death. Even as we begin to prepare for Thanksgiving, and Advent, and December, and Christmas itself in our personal lives, we realize that there will be new opportunities in these rather old and traditional holiday times. To everything there is a season. We turn into our next season with hope, and with joy!
