Posted on: 18th December 2025

One of my favourite readings for a funeral contains those bittersweet words from Ecclesiastes…

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what 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.

Recently I have been conscious, as Advent’s wintry chill has descended, of the reminder that there is a time to plant, but there is also a time to pluck up what is planted. Last year, to my wife’s exasperation, I added the ever-increasing number of fruit trees in our small garden, and this time it was a fig tree. Unfortunately my choice of location hasn’t proved particularly great, and the fig tree has struggled over the year. The way fig trees grow, they produce fruit one season, which will ripen the following. Sadly looking at the sparse tree at the end of this summer there was no prospect of anything for next year, and so I decided a couple of weeks ago to take the plunge, uproot the tree and plant it in a more favourable location. Nothing will happen immediately, maybe not even for a year or two, but I hope and pray, that our plucky little fig tree, will in time bear fruit worthy of its relocation. John the Baptist in the Gospel reading for the second Sunday of Advent, exhorts us to also bear fruit worthy of our repentance. Maybe we can see repentance as not just saying we are sorry for our failure to bear fruit, but something closer to its original meaning, which is seeking a change of heart and mind, or maybe as illustrated by my fig tree, seeking new spiritual soil. 

This time of Advent as we prepare to receive Christ once again, is also a time with its wintery overtones, to take the opportunity to step back for a moment and like gardeners surveying the soil at the end of the growing season, perform a spiritual health check. What are the conditions of our spiritual soil and are they conducive to bearing fruit going forward? Do we need the delicate pruning of mature reflection, the fertilizer of prayer, or the mulching of a good retreat? Or if our spiritual soil is completely exhausted, is some deeper change needed, like uprooting and seeking new spiritual soil? For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven and that includes a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.