Minister's Musing

Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

May 2008

Driving up to Boston a couple of weeks ago to see our newly born granddaughter gave me a lot of time to reflect on the many transitions that life deals to us all. So much of what goes on in the early part of our lives is about individuation, about defining who we are and how we will engage the world. The visual image that comes to mind is a

rising arc. If we are lucky, we find a place, a role that fits our gifts and who we are: the right occupation, the right kinds of relationships, and families, too, if we follow that path.

It may take a while and there may be some hard bumps along the way, but we find an identity that satisfies us, or at least that we can make peace with. Eventually, though, it seems to me that we come to a point where that rising arc turns and, again, if we are lucky, our lives come to define something like a circle; we find completeness in our days. Part of what happens when the arc turns is that our perspective shifts. What we do, what concerns us is less about us, about that identity we have spent so much energy defining. Instead, our perspective widens and we appreciate in many ways our wider connections.

Many spiritual traditions speak of this transition, which they often associate with eldering. Eldering is not just the aging of the flesh; it is a recognition of the deepening of wisdom available to us all, letting go of what we have long taken to be individually ours and understanding ourselves more to be part of a communion of being. It is no longer achievement that drives us but completion and the possibility giving some legacy to the future.

It is presumptuous, I know, for me to speak of such things, months away as I am from just my 55th birthday. And yet our granddaughter’s birth has given me some intimation of what that perspective might be. There is much more that I hope to contribute in my life, but as I held and rocked that tiny child I felt a tug that connected me in a way I never knew before to another rhythm, older and deeper than myself. I saw myself as a link in a chain extending farther than I can fathom into the future, and a chain not just of being but also of hope and love. May that be my legacy.