Community Post: The Surprising Bedfellows of Transition
Blog / Produced by The High Calling
EDITOR’S NOTE: This week at The High Calling, we’re focusing on transitions in the workplace, home, and community. Here on the Community page, several members of our diverse writing network offer their unique insights on the topic.
It was Christmas morning. Seven shining sets of eyes circled a homely tree with about as much aesthetic appeal as Charlie Brown’s. My plastic ornaments from the 1970’s, now yellowed with age, danced side by side with the sparkle of unmolested glitter from the ones we tore into only last December. Don’t the holidays always arrange for such odd bedfellows?
Synthetic branches in the tree’s three ascending segments had been placed on top of each other in the wrong order, forfeiting the traditional triangular shape for a slightly less appealing hourglass impression. The twinkle of winding lights that usually wrap a tree around, forgiving whatever else might be askew, were feeling ambivalent at best. Even this morning, on their ONE big day a year, they flickered on and off before finally deciding that "off" suited them fine. But those seven sets of eyes didn’t notice the hodge-podge decorations or the fickle lighting. They didn’t snicker at the top-heavy tallest branches. This tree was theirs. That’s what mattered.
And although I’ve always considered it an accomplishment if I can get the tree and her charms put away and greet the first of January without tinsel caught between my toes, this year I have wondered if there’s something to be gained from spending a few minutes longer around that old, ambivalent tree.
Light the balsam candle one more time.
Kick off your shoes and break out that last batch of eggnog.
Maybe what I need--what you need?--is not a running head start from the things of yesteryear into the things of tomorrow. Maybe what we need is to let our yesterdays inform our tomorrows. Perhaps our footprints tell us not only where we’ve been, but also something about where we’re going. For we do not step into the new as fractured, splintered creatures, blank as that proverbial slate which John Locke was so fond of. Our past, which does not define us, nevertheless, does compel us. Toward living our own story. Toward following our own passion. Toward a life of integration.
Because transition can be a messy place. And sometimes we think that living forward into all that is wild and new implies that nothing old is needed. That it can be discarded with the pine needles. But as much as I want to sweep the last of those prickly pests into the garbage and face the New Year with crisp resolutions in hand, something in the old cries out. Not to be renounced, but to be embraced. For the crystal steeple on the church ornament that we hung proudly upon securing our first pastorate all those years ago is still part of me, no matter how far removed I may feel from the experience. It is not only a place to come from, but a place that I have never really left.
Certainly there are times when we need to make a radical shift. There are times when turning from the old does require violence of the most intimate kind. For those in a place like that, I say: Do it. Make the break. Grieve hard. Let the anger loose. But in all of that, know that the landscape of forgiveness is very vast. And there will come a day when the shattered pieces of brokenness will not only be gathered up, but somehow made into beauty. A day of assimilation.
Maybe our work in the process of transition is not always about breaking free from old things so that we can proceed on to the unmolested new. Maybe it is just as much about knowing how to make peace with what is past so that we can recognize integration to be our most surprising bedfellow in the quest toward wholeness.
Perhaps it is then that we find ourselves star-struck by our wobbling Christmas tree lives.
Because they’re ours, yes. And because they’re His.