Endings And Beginnings

Endings seem to lie in wait. Absorbed in our experience we forget that an ending might be approaching. Consequently, when the ending signals its arrival, we can feel ambushed. Perhaps there is an instinctive survival mechanism in us that distracts us from the inevitability of ending, thus enabling us to live in the present with innocence and whole-heartedness. John O’Donahue (To Bless the Space Between Us)

Endings come to us via a myriad of diverse situations, and we greet their arrival with as many varied responses. Generally speaking they are not something that we humans welcome, and often we do everything to avoid their inevitability. Sometimes they are out of our control and sometimes they are orchestrated by a necessary and well thought out decision, yet we are cautious of their approach because of the lack of our ability to know what is around the corner. As O’Donahue says, ‘we can feel ambushed’ by their imminent arrival.

As a faith community Edge Kingsland has just experienced one such ending. Through an arduous process that covered a couple of years we made the decision to leave the place we have called home for 13 years and find another that could suit our whanau needs. This was a painful process for most of us, and using the words ‘it’s the right thing to do’ didn’t really offer much solace in times of loss and grief. We needed to be able to embrace the range of emotions that accompany change and allow these experiences to shape us. They enabled us to know what it is we can leave behind, and what we must carry into the future. The process is ongoing.

Endings are not cut and dried, in fact they are always found on the same road that holds any new beginning. They are travelling companions. If we look closely enough we may be able to see where one thing stopped and another began, but at a deeper level they will still be carefully intertwined. Like the ending of a chapter of a book and start of another, the new depends totally on the old in its becoming.

Sometimes it would be easy if we could just cut our past out of us and forget it all happened. But John O’Donahue offers a reflection on the impossibility of the quest for closure by describing humans as ‘creatures made of clay with porous skins and porous minds…quite incapable of the hermetic (airtight) sealing that the strategy of "closure" seems to imply.’ No, rather we must embrace the truth of our past, acknowledge it and allow it to become part of the story of our future. I still dream about a decision I made 20 years ago. I would love for it all to disappear from my memory but that would in fact cut out a huge chunk of my life which for the most part was amazing. So I knit it into my story.

O’Donahue goes on to say that ‘completion is a truer word…each experience has within it a dynamic of unfolding and a narrative of emergence’. In this way whatever is ending in our lives is in fact enabling a new beginning.

So for our Church Community it is the end of something and the beginning of another. I use the word ‘something’ as opposed to ‘the old’ as it enables the possibility that even the things that have ended still have a life of their own and can find their way to fulfilment in the days to come. Both the end and the beginning belong to Story line that we are writing together. And for you who are experiencing endings of some kind or another, let them be a part of your narrative, and let them continue to accompany you on the road.

Linda Burson Swift