Dear All,
This week we are focused on changes, transitions in our lives. We move through so many stages in our lives and it is challenging to find ways to adjust and to make the ‘newness’ that each stage brings us into life and positivity despite loss, grief that comes our way inevitably. For some of us ageing is taking its toll but hopefully something here will help us on our way.
We have Rutters ‘Go Forth’ as the blessing this week – may it bring you and your family many blessings.
With love
Information in advance:
Zoomed Evening Prayer: there are some days coming up when it isn’t possible for us to zoom – ie Monday 22 June, Friday 3 July (Community only), Sunday 5 July, Friday 3 July (Community only). We will remind you again nearer the time.
Changes and Transitions
Change involves necessary losses and gains, both favourable and unfavourable.
We need to acknowledge and grieve the unfavourable losses.
Mourn for former states of self:
Changes in our body redefine us.
Events of our personal history redefine us.
At several points in our life we will have to relinquish a former
self-image and move on.
In periods of stability, we are putting together a structure for our life:
Making key choices.
Pursuing certain goals.
In periods of transition, we are challenging the premises of that structure.
Raising questions.
Exploring new possibilities.
Each transition leads to a termination of a previous life structure, and each termination is an ending, a process of loss or separation.
Effective change involves letting go of what was acknowledging and grieving the losses, and moving on creatively to new life.
Unknown author
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip to the intermediate stages. We are impatient to being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that is made by passing through some stages of instability and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you. Your ideas mature gradually – let them grow, let them shape themselves without due haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time will make you tomorrow. Only God can say what this new spirit gradually forming in you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of leaving yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves—like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
Our Weakness Blesses Others
Our weakness and old age call people to surround us and support us. By not resisting weakness and by gratefully receiving another’s care we call forth community and provide our caregivers an opportunity to give their own gifts of compassion, care, love, and service. As we are given into their hands, others are blessed and enriched by caring for us. Our weakness bears fruit in their lives.
And dying is our ultimate vulnerability. Instead of looking at the weakness of old age as simply the experience of loss after loss, we can choose it as a passage to emptiness where our hearts have room to be filled with the Spirit of Love overflowing. It is ultimate weakness, but is also potentially the greatest moment of our fruitfulness.
Henri Nouwen