Eventide & Altar

You have now lived through every pair Ecclesiastes names tonight, most of them more than once. A time to plant, a time to uproot. A time to embrace, a time to be far from embraces. A time to keep, a time to cast away. A long life is not one season sustained from beginning to end. It is this entire list, worked through in an order you did not choose and mostly could not have predicted, and Qoheleth's point in reciting it is not despair but accuracy - this is simply what a human life actually consists of, and pretending otherwise never spared anyone the next season on the list.

Psalm 144 asks the question that belongs specifically to a life this long: LORD, what is man, that you notice him? Man is like a breath; his days like a passing shadow. That is not a complaint. It is closer to wonder - that something as brief as a human life, made of nothing but a sequence of times and seasons that all eventually pass, would be noticed by God at all. Most of what filled your own particular seasons is already forgotten, even by you. And yet.

The Gospel gives you Peter's answer to the question that actually matters more than any season: who do you say that I am? Jesus does not ask what other people think, and he does not accept a secondhand answer. At this stage of a long life, with most of your seasons already behind you, that question deserves your own answer too, not the one you absorbed from habit or upbringing decades ago. Jesus follows Peter's right answer immediately with the cost of it - suffering, rejection, death, and only then resurrection. Your own long life has likely followed something like that same order more than once, in smaller ways. Tonight is a fitting night to notice it.

The Sorrowful Mysteries tonight. Offer a decade for the seasons of your own life that were hardest to name honestly at the time, and are only clear now in hindsight.

• For the grace to answer honestly, in our own words, who we say Christ is, we pray to the Lord.
• For all currently living through a season named in today's reading that they did not choose, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who have died, whose seasons on this earth have now completed their full number, we pray to the Lord.

Look back over your own life and name, honestly, which season you are actually in right now - not the one you wish described you, the one that actually does. Sit with that name for a few minutes before moving on.