Nights are long in this time of the year. The sounds of humans are muted. The lights are low, and we are still. We hear in the barren limbs of the trees the movement of God, carefully watching over his creation.

I have a dear friend, a Benedictine sister, Sister Joan Chittister, OSB. She remembers what she hears in the stillness of her monastery. God does not grab her attention with a burst of light, dazzling to the eye, overpowering. Rather, he speaks with a sparkle, with movement, with a surprise at each turn of the spirit, the wind.

She writes, “The modern world takes the position that change for the sake of change is progress. Where is the proof of that? Is it in the growth of ghettoes and child labor and slavery and prisons? The poet Edna St. Vincent Milay wrote. “Progress! Progress is the dirtiest word in the language. Who ever told us, and made us believe, that to take a step forward was necessarily and always a good idea?” Change without reflection is change without a soul.

“Time itself is a strange concept. It assumes that the past is old and worthless, and that the present is new, priceless. It fails to understand that the present is what it is precisely because of what we did in the past. The only real question is what are we doing now to make the future better.
“It is easy to assume that all the actions of the present will be corrected in the future. Violence, now, cannot bring peace; hatred cannot bring reconciliation, and self-centeredness cannot bring love and family and personal success. Until we believe that present actions ARE the future, nothing will really change.

“Our time has two aspects,” Sister Joan writes. “One is like the arrow. It moves on like a running river, purposeful, without which there is no progress, no direction, no new vision. And the other is like the circle, without which there is confusion, a meaningless succession of instants, a world without seasons or promises.

“Change, I mean the arrow without the circle, without reflection, is change without a soul.
“Rather, it is the circle, the celebration of feast days and anniversaries and First Communions that alerts us to the real meaning of events. To believe that celebrations are a waste of time, that they really don’t count, aren’t important, squeezes the juice out of life.

“There must be periods of action in life, but there must also be periods of reflection on what the actions really mean, on what has happened to us as a result of them. Each needs the other. Each alone is incomplete.

“Beware the person who tells you simply, “Forget about it.” As in ‘forget about the hurt, about the death, about the loss’. There can be no healthy forgetting of things, until we realize what the thing means to us now. True, the event has passed, but it left a lesson learned.
“An event is only bad, if we fail to become better because of it. The sign of real progress is enrichment. When I and my world are deeper, kinder, softer, stronger as a result of change, that is progress.
“Change and progress are two different things. Change makes today different from yesterday. Progress makes today better than yesterday.

“Time is nothing but a vehicle for understanding the present and our place in it.

“Every event has its extreme, its end, the point at which to do more is to do worse. To contemplate only the end points in life is to watch the soul go to dust. When is money too much money? When is my desire for security actually the cause of my insecurity? When is my love for the other destructive of my self? When is achievement loss?

“My attitude toward time determines my contributions to life. I can be a doer of great things and, in the end, find them useless. I can be a thinker of great thoughts, and at last find them inane. Or, with reflection, I can be a doer who measures my actions by the measure of eternal value. I find them beyond measure.

“They bring satisfaction, Peace. PAX, the motto of monastics, the mood of monasteries.

“Listen! The Creator is working. Out side, but above all, INSIDE.”