The book of Ecclesiastes puts it this way, "To everything there is a season."

Those insights make the process and the purpose of time unquestionably clear. The dullest moments of our lives are liable to illumination if we live long enough. But time has another dimension to it as well. Where achievement and motion are qualities of a culture, time is a commodity. We have objectified time and packaged it and made it seem to be itself a thing. We put it on watches and calendars and schedules. We make wise remarks about losing it and wasting it and spending it and killing it. Good capitalists, but poor poets, we use the same verbs to talk about time as we do to talk about money. We save time and count time and invest time. We forget, too often, to savor time, to enjoy time, to trust time, all time. Instead we fill it and wrench it. We race against it and fight it. We make it enemy instead of friend. And so we lose it.

In the light of these two truths: that time teaches and time disappears, the purpose of time rings unfailingly clear. The purpose of time is not accumulation. The purpose of time is to alert us to ourselves so that we can become, the book of Ecclesiastes implies, with its affirmation of all the dimensions of life, the only thing it's really worth our time to be: a totally human, a deeply spiritual human being.

Oh, we go to church, many of us. But ritual and religion and spirituality are not synonymous. It's very easy to have one without the other. It's very easy to have all of them, in fact, and still to miss the mystical dimensions of the daily dimensions, of life. We can go to church and never become immersed in God. We can espouse a religion and be far far away from God. We can develop a spirituality that's deeply devotional, but never deeply aware of the presence of God here within us, in this situation, now. I can go through life without ever realizing consciously that I am never for a moment out of the womb of God. I can miss that moment of enlightenment when, like the mystic Mechthilde of Magdeburg,

I can say, "I see God in all things and all things in God."

That's the call of Ecclesiastes. It's an awesome thought. If God is in this particular life struggle, and this life struggle, this painful separation, this shocking loss, this deep deep pain, this change of status, of life, of love, has something to do with the development of the God-life in me, then it is to be dealt with reverently and lived through trustingly. Then raging will cease. Then the despair will dissolve. Then the bitterness can ebb. It is not Ecclesiastes implies that God is in this awful thing treating us like mice in cages and tweaking our tails with glee. No, it is that we are living in God, no matter what life is like for us at this particular moment. So, then, what can possibly be taken away that will leave us bereft, once we decide to live in the presence of God?

"Where shall I find God in life?" the disciples asked the elder.

"God is with you everywhere," the holy one replied.

"But if that is true," the disciple asked, "Why can I not see this presence?"

"Because," said the elder, "you are like the fish who, when in the ocean, never notice the water."

Real spirituality demands that we care enough about all the moments of life to live all of them well. The only thing we cannot do in life, Ecclesiastes teaches, is to ignore it. Life is a relentless teacher. Life teaches relentlessly. If there's no other meaning at all to the book of Ecclesiastes, it's surely this: we must come to realize that life is not even. Life is not smooth. All of these things, birth and death, loving and laughing, gaining and losing, will happen in every life. These things are life. We will not be able to avoid them however much we would like to do just that. The purpose of life lies in learning to enjoy each giddy part, to endure each costly part, to cope with every exhausting part, to learn from every colorless part, to stretch and groan and grow, to milk every single period of life dry.

When we live out of time, when we insist on being forty in our sixties, and a teenager in our middle years, and half dead as a young wife, or an adolescent as a middle aged man, we mock the now. We miss the moment. 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 from one lesson to another. The myth of life lived on an even keel persists in the minds of many, perhaps, but the stalwart know that real life demands a better stamina.

Young widows know life's sting. Old inventors know its zest. Middle aged women know its allure. Young couples know its excitement. Middle aged men know its false promise. Children know its partiality - that many thrive some of the time, and that some struggle ceaselessly. But through it all, whatever its twists and turns along the way, life leaves us images of the serene elderly, the ones who fought the fight and found it energizing, found it good. They are proof for the rest of us that if we do not resist it, if we dance the dance of life whole and entire, we, too, may come to the end of it weathered and strong, wizened and laughing, quietly satisfied with what we have learned, for what we have become that we could not have been without our own particular recipe of cleansing pain and perfect joy in proper proportions. There is no such thing as a meaningless moment. Life is a growing thing going from seed to sapling, but always, always toward its purpose, the shaping of the self into a person of quality, compassion and joy. But for that to happen every smaller segment must be faced and cannot be fled.

Indeed, Ecclesiastes weighs them all. He teaches there is a time to kill whatever it is within us that keeps our souls from flying free. There is a time, he says, to refrain from embracing whatever it is that is smothering the heart. There is a time to weep the tears that dignify the going of those things and people in life who have brought us to where we are today. There is a time to embrace the good of life with great thumping hugs that give energy for the rest of the journey. There is a time to reap, to work hard, to achieve and assure the fruits of life. There is a time to glory in the gains of life, to run through life head up and lusty, gathering as we go, piling up the good things and laughing as we do. There is a time to love, to find ourselves in someone else, so that we can find ourselves at all. There is a time to lose, a time to let go of whatever has become our captor in life. There is a time to be born, fresh and full again out of old ideas, old forms, old shapes. There is a time to laugh, to let go of the propriety and old pomposities and join the bungling, lunging, silly human race. There is a time to die, to put an end to things, to stop the carousel, to surrender to the forces of time and trust them. There is a time of war, of struggling against the forces within me that make for my destruction. There is a time to heal ourselves from the hurts that weigh us down and keep us from taking charge of our own emotional lives. There is a time to build up, to construct the new world, to co-create the globe, so that what we leave behind is better than what we have received. Finally, there is a time for peace, for coming to grips with the demons within us, for staring them down and smoothing them out, so that we can spread peace like velvet.

And who shall do these things? The philosophers say the system will. The psychologists say the psyche will. Ecclesiastes, drawing both on reason and on faith, says, no, it is only we ourselves who can complete the dance of life only by dancing it ourselves, with all our hearts, with all our souls. By its very definition, Ecclesiastes implies, life simply demands it of us.

Lydia Talbot: Sister Joan, you seem to live out the dance of life, the dance of time you tell us about in your earlier message, from your Benetvision work in Erie, Pennsylvania, to Beijing, to your new book. How do you seem to do it all?

Joan Chittister: Well, in the first place, it takes a little while to learn it. It's one of the things life teaches you, that you can't control it and so you have to learn to live it. Young people say some things much better than the rest of us. You know, they talk about "going with the flow?" They're right. There's something for my development in everything I do. And if I'd just be open to stepping out of where I am and responding to what's in front of me, the lesson I had to learn in life, then growth takes over where control lets off.

Talbot: You know, as a social psychologist, a media specialist, a Benedictine nun, how did all of that come together for you in Beijing, China?

Chittister: Oh well, it was. It was the perfect composite of life in Beijing for the simple reason that I was able to look at and interpret for others what was going on in me and in, I hope, 40,000 other women. I was also aware, with media background in my own life, that we had to get the message out, and that you have do it in ways that people can absorb it and use it. And as a social psychologist, of course I was concerned about the concerns of women.

Talbot: What did happen to you over there, personally?

Chittister: Oh, Lydia I tell you, what happened to me is my whole life was confirmed. Women who speak for women are sometimes heavily criticized. I'll speak for women to the edge of my grave. I learned that the girl-child depends on me.

Talbot: You must tell us about your new book, Heart of Flesh.

Chittister: Well, it's a feminist spirituality for women and men. What I'm trying to do is to engage us in discovering feminism as a new world view. A new way to see life, relationships, work, the globe. We can't do this as men or women alone. Patriarchy doesn't work. Feminism alone is not going to work if we reduce it to femaleness. Feminism isn't femaleness. It is Christianity given respect for the values that this world needs and is lacking at the present time.

Talbot: What it is it without—without spirituality?

Chittister: Well, feminism without spirituality can be very bitter, very harsh and very impatient. Whatever we do will be done in God's time. This is the flow of the spirit. It is changing the globe. It is not a white western American fad. It's the call to the spirit in women and men. It takes spirituality to live with that.

Talbot: Thanks so much, Sr. Joan. A call to spirit us, what you bring to us each time you appear with us on this program.