I’m thinking a lot about change these days. Change in the world. Change at the church. Change in our lives. Change.
Of course, we know on some level that change in life is constant. Everything is impermanent. Everything is in flux. All that said, my experience has been that more often than not most of us resist things changing. At least all too often that is true in my life.
So the question is how is it that we relate to change? Through the years I have found the work of William Bridges to be helpful. That there are three phases of change that begins with something ending. But before we can find our way into the new beginning—the last phase—there’s the middle phase where we are in between the beginning and the ending. That’s where we can feel unmoored, uncertain. That’s the phase that has sometimes been called the desert phase, where we can feel lost because we have left what has been but haven’t quite found our way to what is new yet.
Perhaps at least having that framework in mind can be helpful. I think this is where spiritual practice can be helpful. Something that we can do on a regular basis that can help keep us grounded and centered.
This year I have been especially aware of change in the church with Rev. Alison’s beginning as senior minister. That has made me more aware of a generational shift in the leadership of the church. And the ongoing coming out of Covid phase is still very much with us. The church that has been is gone and the church that is becoming is still emerging. With all of that comes questions about what our mission is asking of us right now, what our priorities are, how we use our resources. Those are big questions to have before us. And what I have learned through the years is that we often want our church home to be a constant, that we like things at church to stay the same in the midst of whatever changes that are happening in our lives and in the world.
No, change is often not easy. But it also offers of the possibility of transformation and new life.
I’d like to share a favorite poem of mine by Karin Boye that speaks to change and also to possibility.
Yes it hurts when buds burst.
Why otherwise would spring hesitate?
Why otherwise was all warmth and longing locked under pale and bitter ice?
What fever for the new compels it to burst?
Yes it hurts when the buds burst,
there is pain when something grows
and when something must close.
Yes it hurts when the ice drops melt.
Shivering, anxious, swollen it hangs,
gripping the twig but beginning to slip-
its weight tugs it downward, though it resists.
It hurts to become uncertain, cowardly, dissolving
to feel the pull and call of the depth,
yet to hang and only shiver –
to want to remain, keep firm –
yet want to fall.
Then, when it is worst and nothing helps,
they burst, as if in ecstasy, the first buds of the tree,
when fear itself is compelled to let go,
they fall in a glistening veil, all the drops from the twig,
blinking away their fears of the new,
shutting out their doubts about the journey,
feeling for an instant how this is their greatest safety,
to trust in that daring
that shapes the world.
Blessings,
Tom
Rev. Thomas Disrud he/him
Associate Minister
First Unitarian Church of Portland