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Endings and Beginnings
May and June are months for endings and grand celebrations – graduations of all kinds take place in these months. I know that some of you have traveled far and wide to see loved ones graduate, and we have celebrated the graduation of our high school seniors in a wonderful youth service. We have held our Annual Meeting, held towards the end of the church year. And we will soon hold the Service of Our Living Tradition, which honors the milestones of this past year in our church life and in our personal lives.
This is also a time of new beginnings – which are the other side of endings. For graduates, new horizons beckon. For the business end of the church, we also have new ground to plow as we move into another year: welcoming a full time DRE will be one of the big ones. And in our lives, we face new ways of being following the death of a loved one, a wedding, and through all of the other transitions that we face.
So it is that we take time to pause and honor these times of transition. Of course they can come planned or unplanned, hoped for or unbidden, at any time of the year. In the busyness of our schedules, we don’t often pause to take note or respect the magnitude of what transitions mean in our lives. One of our Unitarian ancestors, The Rev. Theodore Parker, who preached to many thousands during the Transcendentalist shift in our history, taught us one of the great spiritual questions during these times of transitions: what is transient and what is permanent? He addressed this question in reference to the religious upheavals in Unitarianism at that time, but it is a worthy question when we do stop to take notice of our endings and beginnings. In the midst of change, what is transient? What is really changing? What is permanent? What will not change in the midst of this transition?
Asking these questions as summer begins can be especially meaningful. We are surrounded by fecundity and abundance. These remind us that we do not need to feel diminished by our transitions, that we have the strength and growth to see us through. In older times, we took full advantage of summer – it was a quieter time, a slower time, an abundant time for reflecting and taking in our changes aside from the usual flurry of activities we experience in other seasons. For some, this is no longer a feature of summer – a sad reflection on the pace of our lives today.
Since we do have relatively short summers here, I ask you to take time to savor the warmth and growth and beauty of summer – get in touch with your inner Huck Finn! Take in the changes that transitions bring to all of us. Live with them in your hearts. You will find there what is transient and what is permanent in your transitions. May this give you much satisfaction.
As for me, I will be leaving on June 20 for our Ministry Days and General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I will spend a couple of days with my mother and brother and his family on the way (I’ll drive to North Carolina and fly from there). Then when I come back I will spend several days with a close friend, a few more with my son in the Adirondacks, and then backpack for a couple weeks on the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires. I’ll be back in early August fresh and ready for our new church year.
I wish you many blessings this summer. I will miss seeing you in July and look forward to our meeting again in August.
Much love, Priscilla
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Rev. Priscilla Richter