In the first edition of There Is A Season by Joan Chittister, the book’s artist, John August Swanson, used the signs of the zodiac to depict the passage of time in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. In the book’s introduction, Sister Joan reflected on these signs as presented by Swanson in a rose window. Here’s her reflection on Cancer, the crab (June 21-July 22).

Cancer, the crab, with its constant shedding of outgrown shell, which is constricting and useless, brings us face to face with the eternal Christian truth: “Unless we go down into the womb and are born again” (John 3:3), we shall surely die. Unless we touch and test and grapple with the things that would make us new, our old self, our small self, shall finally defeat us from within. No enemy need apply. We are more than capable of taking ourselves down. All we have to do is to refuse to grow.

Growth, on the other hand, is a very strange process. It starts at a dead-end. Growth changes us. Growth happens only when nothing has happened for far too long. Growth comes out of death like a horizon out of fog, catching us unaware, making us different people than when we first began. Learning is development; change is growth. Change is conversion, total and cataclysmic.

Conversion is not an exercise in orthodoxy. Conversion is the heart-wringing process of becoming new—always and regularly and with exhausting consciousness. When we give ourselves to the process of conversion, day after long, long day, we give ourselves to the eternal moment of birth, of being new again. Otherwise we shall surely shrivel, fixed in a state of mind, a state of heart, a phase of life too small for us to breathe, to think, to be.

If Cancer teaches us anything, it teaches us to shed shells with abandon, to become what we were not with grace and with confidence that what we are giving up allows entrance to a shining beginning. However much time the process of new understanding, new love, new security takes, the process must never be abandoned, whatever our age.

—from There Is A Season, (first edition) by Joan Chittister, art by John August Swanson (Orbis).