Beginning with the End

Hi Friends!

To be clear, I am not a blogger, but I wanted to offer a way for us to interact around our Sunday series on Finding Yourself In Transition: Using Life's Changes for Spiritual Awakening by Robert Brumet. My intention is to offer a follow-up to our Sunday conversation as well as some questions to help guide a deeper inquiry. Let's see how it goes!

Many of you have shared that this topic hit home for you. Some of you are supporting your parents through their final transtions, some are loving your spouses through the transtitions resulting from a health challenge, and others are mending your broken hearts after a break-up.

As we all continue to process the events of the past few years, along with the current crisis in Ukraine, a great many of us are feeling a deep sense of loss and uncertainty.

Here at USCD, we too are have entered a time of transition with the recent changes in leadership. It is tempting to want to rush right into 'new beginnings' but we are wise to slow down and honor the process of transition. 

While it may also be tempting to throw up our hands or bury our heads, I enourage us all to honor this time of transition for all that is has to teach us- about ourselves, eachother and the collective expereince that we can create together. May we continue to know and to trust the Divine pattern at work within each of us and all of creation.

Let's begin by considering the following passages from Robert Brumet:

First, each transition begins with an ending. Change means letting go of the old before we are able to embrace the new. So the first stage of the transition process is “endings.”  

It is essential that we listen to and trust this power at work in our lives, in whatever form God is expressing, even if it feels painful or confusing at the time, for we rarely understand the reason for the changes in our lives when we are in the midst of our emotional reaction to them.  

Change, especially a major change or one that intrudes swiftly and unexpectedly into our life, often “breaks the shell” that encloses our understanding, and even our sense of reality.  

Pain can show us where we may be resisting the breaking of the “old shell” and inhibiting the emergence of the “larger reality,” for indeed, most of our pain arises from resistance.  

By understanding the dynamics of the transition process, we can learn how to minimize our pain and facilitate the birth of a new life, {a larger reality}.  

Each transition in general, and each stage in particular, has a specific gift for us if we but learn how to recognize and accept it.

 

The idea that the ‘old shell’ of our individual and collective understanding is being broken in order for a ‘larger reality’ to emerge, offers a helpful perspective for what many of us are feeling. In some ways, it feels like life as we knew it, has ended and we are indeed in that liminal space in between the old and the new. 

The phases of that process that Robert Brumet helps to guide us through are:
Endings, The Void, New Beginnings. 

A transition always begins with an Ending. If we can befriend the grief and discomfort that often accompany endings, we can better process the experience and all that it brings up in us. It affords us a valuable opportunity to learn more about ourselves-- where we might be holding on or resisting the change, and what larger reality may be trying to emerge.

I invite you take some time to consider the following questions:

•  Can you notice what, exactly, feels like it is ending, and what about that might you be resisting?

• Is there a limited understanding about yourself, others, or even God that you may need to release?

• What 'larger reality' do you think may be trying to emerge? 

Join us at 10 am on Sunday as we continue to explore this process.