Text for the Month
'For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.'
Ecclesiastes 3:1
There is something honest about October. The days shorten. The air sharpens. The leaves turn gold and red and amber before letting go. Nature does not pretend that endings are not happening. It marks them with beauty, and then it releases. There is a spiritual wisdom in this that our relentless and productivity-obsessed culture struggles to absorb.
Qohelet, the "Teacher" of Ecclesiastes, was no stranger to this kind of wisdom. His book is one of the strangest in the Bible: unflinchingly honest about the limits of human striving, suspicious of easy answers, and deeply attentive to the rhythms of life that we cannot control. He would, one suspects, have been a difficult person to have on a church committee. But he would have made excellent company on a long walk in an autumn wood.
His great poem of seasons is not fatalism. It is not a shrug of the shoulders that says nothing matters. It is something more demanding: an invitation to be present to whatever time it actually is, rather than the time we wish it were. There is a time to speak and a time to be silent. A time to build and a time to let things fall away. A time to mourn and a time to dance. The wisdom lies not in controlling the seasons, but in learning to read them well.
This feels particularly important in a world that is moving very fast. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we work and think. Political upheaval is a constant backdrop. The pace of change can leave even the most resilient among us feeling quietly disoriented. Into this, Ecclesiastes whispers something almost counter-revolutionary: slow down. Pay attention. Not everything can be optimised. Not every problem can be solved before winter comes.
And yet this is not a counsel of despair. Woven through the Teacher's realism is an insistence on the goodness of simple things: food shared with people we love, work done with honest hands, the quiet satisfaction of being present to the life we actually have rather than the one we are perpetually chasing.
For us as the German YMCA community, October is a moment to breathe. Summer's busyness has passed. The deep mid-winter is not yet here. This is a good season for reflection, for asking what we need to release, what we want to tend carefully through the colder months, and who we want to journey alongside.
The leaves let go without grasping.
Perhaps, this October, so can we.
Sabrina Gröschel, Chaplain of the German YMCA in London