We are receiving text messages from my stepson, Tim, our younger child who this week started college.  “Awesome.”  “This place is so cool.”  We are happy he seems happy — but just a little worried about the time of night at which the messages are sent.  He’s out on his own for the first time — a big transition — both for parents and their sons and daughters.

My 85-year old father’s conversations with me these days are often sprinkled with speculation as to whether his various appliances will last longer than he does and hopes that he won’t have to replace his ‘89 Toyota .  I am not hoping he will get a new car; even in a small town in Oregon , his driving worries me, but I do hope he will outlast the car.  Still, he is constantly reminding me that some day not too long in the future, we will lose him.

My best friend, Julie, just called me with the happy news that she is about to become a grandmother for the second time.  Her daughter, Lisa, is like a niece, so I am excited to be adding another newborn to the circle of those I love.  And, of course, my husband, David, and I have moved once again, to a new church, a new home, and a new city .

Transitions are constants in our lives.  Or as Gilda Radner used to say, “It is always something.”  We like to think life will achieve some steady state — and I have to say that one thing I like about middle age is that so far it is more peaceful than youth.  But, of course, we are always experiencing changes:  arrivals, departures, new seasons.  Even though he is 85, my Dad still seems to think some day things will achieve some steady state.  He is always saying to me, “I’ll do that after I get caught up.”  I want to say to him, “Hey, Dad, if you aren’t caught up at 85, it’s not going to happen.”  But one thing that makes middle age a little more peaceful is that I don’t as often overestimate my ability to change the habits of members of my family.

Even though we all go through them, transitions aren’t easy.  Be they sad or happy or in-between, they cause upheaval in the lives of all who are a part of them.  This may be one reason that many of the most important ones:  birth, coming of age, marriage, death, have had religious rituals associated with them throughout the world and from as far back as we have records.  And when religion doesn’t celebrate an important transition, people try to fill in the gap with ceremonies of their own:  graduation ceremonies, retirement celebrations, housewarming parties.  I’ve been asked about creating a ceremony for a couple who lost a baby before it was born and another for a woman who was going through a divorce.

I began thinking about transitions and the ceremonies that celebrate them when I went to seminary and realized that in the ministry I would be asked to do rites of passage.  Unitarian Universalist ministers don’t have a set script for a wedding or a funeral.  Most Protestants have a standard service.  And back when I began school, we UU’s were just coming out of a rather “anything goes” period in which sensible boundaries were not only stretched but broken.  So I was looking for some clarity about what these transitional ceremonies were for.  What is a wedding ceremony or a funeral service supposed to do — in theory?

It didn’t take too much digging to find out several interesting things.  One is that throughout the many cultures there was an amazing similarity of vision as to the purpose and structure of rites of passage.  Times of transition were seen as dangerous times, times in which the old order was disrupted, chaos and confusion followed, and a new way of being had to be discovered or attained.  The rite of passage was seen as a way to help us safely through the chaos of the transition.

What was particularly interesting was that whether people lived in Africa, South America, or the Pacific Islands , each culture seemed to have similar conceptions of three stages of transition.  The first stage was called such things as separation, death, saying goodbye, leaving. 

At birth a child leaves behind the cradling embrace of its mother’s womb, the cord is cut.  As the child comes of age, she leaves childhood behind.  In some cultures, parents even have a kind of funeral ritual for the child coming of age, symbolizing the death of childhood.  In marriage we leave behind a way of life, we become a separate family.  The “giving away of the bride” was one way in which that was once symbolized in the Christian Church.  In the Jewish ceremony, both families accompany their son or daughter separately to the altar, and the ceremony ends with the couple leaving together.  All the world’s cultures, in their rituals, recognize that with every change, even the most joyful, there are goodbyes to be said, losses, separation.

In religious conversion stories, there is frequently the theme of separation.  Buddha leaves his princely duties.  Jesus leaves home and goes out into the wilderness.  Abraham goes out of Ur .  Moses leaves Egypt .  The new convert leaves his secular life.  The man who is born again leaves behind drinking and gambling.  Martin L uther King leaves Montgomery . 

The second stage of the transition is in-between times, called creative chaos, called liminality.  The old structures have been left behind, the new not yet created.  Any of you who have ever been through a major renovation in your home can probably relate to that, or if not, you can look downstairs in the church’s basement.  You tear out the old, perhaps there is nothing left of the old but some wooden slats, and then there are weeks or even months when there is dust everywhere, all your routines which involved that place are disrupted — you may even have to move out for a time.  In our less physical transitions, the dislocation is perhaps even more profound — renovations, after all don’t change our lives as much as marriage, birth, and death.

We live in a culture that is unusually uncomfortable with that “liminality” — that in-between time.  Partly, because we are a hurry-up culture that doesn’t want to take the time necessary for change.  We expect quick fixes, quick results, overnight transformations.  It is ironic that in an era in which so much change is occurring, we may have less tolerance for the ambiguity and the chaos that healthy, creative changes require than we once did.

Traditionally, cultures worldwide have recognized these liminal, chaotic “in-between” times as times of danger and of opportunity.  In the in-between times the structures of society have been loosened or even thrown away, and we are released from our former constraints but have not yet adopted a new structure.  Rituals are sometimes invented to help us bridge these times of transition.  Our society once had formal recognition of important in-between times, and many cultures still do.  The couple who would marry had a betrothal or a period of engagement, in which they were no longer single but not yet married.  This brought with it a certain loosening of the rules surrounding the relations between single men and women, a betrothed or engaged couple were allowed a great deal more physical and social contact than single men and women.

Until relatively recently, mourning periods recognized that those who had lost a loved one were not as they once were, but were not yet returned to their full role in society.  People wore special clothing, black in our culture, and they performed certain rituals.  L ess was expected of them.  They didn’t entertain.  Emotional displays were accepted.  Some religious communities retain some remnants of this — in the Jewish tradition the immediate family sits Shiva for seven days following the funeral, comforting each other, telling stories about the deceased, and receiving visitors who bring food, comfort, and stories of their own.  Kaddish, a special prayer for the dead, is said for the following months and on the anniversary of the death.  The end of a year of mourning may be marked by the laying of the tombstone on the grave.

Until I began to see it close at hand, I never realized both how helpful it can be to have patterns and rituals surrounding death.  When we suffer a profound loss, we often are more than a little crazy — we don’t know what to do — and having rituals and customs that guide us through the first few weeks and months can be a lifeline.  But living as we do in a culture in which customs and practices may conflict or where many are without clear ideas as to appropriate behavior, an already stressful time becomes even more difficult, and people’s relationships with each other become needlessly strained because our expectations of one another are unclear.  In communities in which it is clearly understood that when someone you know dies, you will attend their funeral and call on their family bringing something to eat — or if far away send a note of condolence — comfort is given and received and everyone knows what is expected of them at such a time.  My father is more than a bit of an iconoclast, but when my mother died, he was tremendously moved by the notes and the visits and the huge attendance at her memorial service.  Since then, he has been much more careful to make similar acknowledgement of the death of others. 

We Unitarians have often neglected the sense of an in-between time — we have often tended to have a practical, “get on with it,” “let’s get organized” kind of approach to life.  We sometimes don’t like to acknowledge that there are times when there is nothing we can do in the inevitable chaos of life’s changes.  We often don’t acknowledge that (when there is nothing to be done), having something to do — a ritual, a daily practice, an outreached hand — is not some outdated artifact, but a lifeline — tiny, yes, in that sea of chaos but better than nothing at all.

Many of us are surprised to learn that when a beloved family member breathes their last, it can still be quite some time before they leave us.  More than one secular humanist has confided that they heard, or saw, or felt the presence of a loved one after the funeral.  Almost all of us have times, especially at first, when we go to dial a phone to call someone who can no longer answer or when we begin to make a mental note to tell them about something, before remembering that conversation is concluded.  For nearly a year after my mother died, when I heard an intriguing book review on NPR, I began to make a mental note to tell her about it just as I remembered I could no longer share something new with her.  My mother was such a great book lover that she began reading Ann a Karen ina the week before she died.  It takes quite a while before someone we love dearly is no longer a presence or an aching absence.  It takes quite a while before we take up a new life without them.  And certainly, there is, for some time, a sort of limbo.

In times of transition that are less about loss and more about change — for births, graduations, coming of age, marriage — that chaotic time and how we handle it often set the course for the future.  Do we rebel against the responsibilities of parenthood, or do we try to learn all we can even if we are scared to death?  One new father, when he brought the baby home exclaimed to his wife, “God, they give you more instructions with a Goldfish!”

One of the reasons churches in most mainline Protestant faiths have interim ministers these days is the idea that transitions are difficult and also times of opportunity, a time to try new things, time to question the old and prepare for something new.  L ike anything, it works better in some cases than in others, but I know that when I did an interim ministry in a large church that had struggled for years sharing its space with a nursery school, a school whose director was crotchety and rude to everyone she came into contact with (in the church).  It was far easier for me as an interim to ask why they put up with that behavior and what was the value of the school to the church.  A few calculations demonstrated that they were losing money in addition to peace of mind and a problem of ten years’ standing was resolved in a month — the school found a more suitable home, and the church school children had space suited to them.  

In the religious and spiritual literature, the time of chaos, the liminal time, is a time of transformation.  It is the young aborigine on his walkabout.  It is the initiate in seclusion.  It is the pilgrims’ journey to the holy shrine.  It is the Jewish people wandering in the desert.  It is Jesus in the wilderness.  It is the dark night of the soul.  It is Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond .  It is Buddha under the bodi tree.  One of the purposes of meditation or prayer is to have a little piece of that liminal, unstructured, receptive time in everyday life, a time when the inner spirit can be released from the structures for a few moments.

For me, one purpose of our religious or spiritual life is to keep us both safe and open during the liminal times of transition and change so that our anxiety does not overwhelm us and block us from the creativity and transformation that can sometimes happen in such times.

The third stage of a passage or transition is called the re-incorporation, the rebirth, the transformation.  That is when the new house is built, the new baby is part of the family, the youngster becomes a grown up, the married couple is thinking of “us” and “our future” rather than “me” and “my future,” the spiritual seeker has found a new way of being in relation to the holy and in relation to the world.   

Some traditions, like evangelical Christianity, see the transformation as being sudden and rapid:  the spirit comes upon you and you are born again.  Other traditions are much more rooted, like Judaism, which has an ever-present sense of ritual, tradition and history.

My experience of transitions lies somewhat in between.  I think the idea that there are three stages of every transition: saying goodbye, in-between times, and new life, describes something real and useful.  It is helpful to me to realize that I need to say goodbye — it reminds me if not to embrace the chaos, to at least not be frightened by it — and even try to use it as an opportunity for growth and understanding — and to open up and discover the new structure into which I am moving.  But like all the stages theories we hear about, it doesn’t happen one, two, three.  We may have said lots of goodbyes and still, months or years later find there is more to be said.  We may have moved out of the chaos into the new life, when something plunges us backward again.  We may have been born again and given up hard liquor and gambling, but we pass by our old haunts and get drawn back into the game.  We may have been married for several years and still forget to let our spouse know we will be late for dinner.  Nineteenth-century Unitarian clergyman Theodore Parker writes about how we don’t get married all at once but gradually, over years.  Birthing is not a quick process, it is not something we control, it takes months, of growing and at the end the most intense and painful labor imaginable.  A newborn is the result, too, of thousands of generations of genetic heritage that combined to become a particular baby.   

It seems to me that our UU tradition suggests that to be spiritually awake, we don’t go through a single transformation, but rather we go through many — not just born again, but born again, and again, and again.  There is not a single moment of enlightenment but various revelations throughout our life’s spiritual journey.

Life, is a series of turnings and transformations.  As a child, I thought there would be a day when I would truly have come of age, be “grown up.”  And as a young adult I would think, “I have left home — now I am grown up.”  “I can vote today — now I am grown up.”  “I am making a living — now I am grown up.”  “I have known true heartbreak and suffering — now I am grown up.”  Finally, I began to realize that life is never a steady state for those of us alive and growing.  To live religiously is to be open to turning in a new direction, being willing and able to take the next step, to live into each new season.  

I once polled my middle-aged friends about their favorite elders: who did they think of as wise old men and women — for my fear of aging was not so much the deterioration of my body but the deterioration of my spirit.  And as each person described the elders they admired, I noticed that they had several things in common:  for everything they lost in life, they found something else.  L iving had not lost its savor, nor had they ceased exploring and learning and thinking.  They had not only rich pasts but also rich futures.  My mother was such a person.  She started Ann a Karen ina in her last days.  She thought about her funeral service.  She said goodbye to friends and comforted a few.  The wise elders have rich pasts, but look forward, too.  Time does not lie heavy on their hands.  They are the kind of people who exclaim in retirement, “I don’t know how I ever had time to work!”  They had learned to regard life’s constant transitions not only as loss, but also as opportunity.  They had learned to live in life’s wilderness moments with a confidence that they would bring something out and create anew.

Here in this congregation we are going through a transition — down in the basement as the Common Room is transformed and we have to do things in new places or in new ways — and in the church as you take what you have learned here and who you are and I take what I have learned in Georgia , Pennsylvania, Florida, and California and who I am, and we try to forge a partnership that will take the best of what we are to create a new partnership for the future of this church.  We are still amidst the chaos, things are not pinned down, we are living with uncertainty and hope and trying to be open and creative in this liminal time.  We will be moving together to create something new out of who we are and where we have been.  Your welcome has been a warm one, I am happy to be here.  Hello.

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Updated Nov 8,2007 wfr