Transformation

We end up living on the surface of life pursuing this trinket and that bauble. We forget to go deeper and may end up eventually saying—with so many needs unfulfilled—“Is this all there is?”

Our religious communities exist to meet deep needs involving meaning and significance, care and connection, compassion and justice, forgiveness and courage, and love and longing.

This brings me to two questions: First, what need(s) brought you to church? This is not an easy question to answer, especially if we wonder whether or not the needs in the deepest part of our selves can ever be met. Second, what do you need of your church? To be sure, you want certain things in a church if you are to participate in it and support it. But articulating our needs of the church is to encourage us to collectively look, not so much at the breadth of our programming, but at its depth. It is important to remember what brought us to church so that we stay focused on meeting those needs. As May Sarton wrote in her poem Gestalt at Sixty, “Lovers and friends,/I come to you starved/For all you have to give,/Nourished by the food of solitude,/A good instrument for all you have to tell me,/For all I have to tell you./We talk of first and last things,/Listen to music together,/Climb the long hill to the cemetery/In autumn,/Take another road in spring/Toward new lambs./No one comes to this house/Who is not changed./I meet no one here who does not change me.”

Our congregations have as their work transforming lives. They need to become centers of transformation. To be sure, this involves personal growth, but the religious community also has the task of transforming the world.

Robert Grudin has written, “What we understand best, we understand by renewal—by looking at the same thing again and again in different ways, looking at it internally and externally, walking around it, turning it in our hands, participating in it until some strange abstract spirit of its being rises from the complexity of effort and detail. And what we have best, we have by renewal—by chronic challenges never refused, by danger of loss, by repeated cherishings, and by love remembered.” His words remind me of what it means to participate in religious community over time. The community becomes more meaningful as experience after experience become part of a treasure of connection and memory. And, in the end, we are transformed.