Dear Friends,
Two weeks ago, we
talked about the disciples “learning to recognize the Risen One who did not look
just as He did before His death.” Another
theme found in these post –Easter season is transition: the followers of
Christ were learning to live out their discipleship in new and untried ways,
without his obvious presence.
They had come to understand themselves as disciples of Christ, but now what did it mean?
Where would their direction come from? How would they work through next steps
without Him? Of course, they were not without Him, but they had to come to that
realization, as we do. He is with us through our life -movements.
Just as you and I need to learn to recognize the Risen One
in our daily lives, we need to see Him in the transitions that fill our lives
and challenge us.
A transition may be a passage to a new living place, a
marriage, or reception into a religious order. The death of a parent, sibling,
friend marks a transition for us as well
as for them. We transition to jobs, and way of thinking and acting. We accept
new values and walk away from prior values.
I got kicked out of kindergarten less than a month after starting school and was sent “on probation “ to first grade. It was painful. I cried every day for weeks because I wanted to play and now I had to work. Later, I came to realize that I was in transition when the people around me were not. That’s hard, isn’t it?
Throughout our lives, change happens. In airplanes, shift
happens in the overhead bins. With care, we open them to retrieve our luggage,
but then that’s over. Not all changes are transitions, i.e. life altering.
Transition may mean changing patterns. Sometimes, our transitions
are sequential, sometimes they are simultaneous. We move from orientation to disorientation to
reorientation. In this, we are not
different from other people who don’t allow themselves to stand still.
Throughout
His ministry, Jesus accepted moments of transition.
He found them at Cana, when He accepted His mother’s call and turned water into wine, with the Syro-Phoenician woman, when he
ministered to a Gentile, and in the
Garden of Gethsemane, when he prayed “Let this cup pass me by, but not as I
will.” Our way to life-giving transition becomes enriched, ennobled, when we study Jesus, and when we drink deeply
of his lessons:
Love God , know that I am loved, speak the truth in love, be faithful, be open, seek first the reign of God, feed them yourselves, embrace the cross/the grave/new life.
And let’s
not forget to study the transitions of His followers after the Resurrection.
They spent time deepening who they had become, they remained in prayer
before Pentecost, and then they went
into the whole world to set it on fire with God’s love.
~Sister Joan Sobala
