Our monthly spiritual theme of emergence seems to invite attention to that which is emerging, to the new creation and the new spiritual habits that must follow. We tend to focus on the butterfly as it leaves the cocoon, on the chick as it leaves the egg. Our worship for the next two Sundays will focus on the new that is emerging in these days. 

But the process of emerging destroys the cocoon and the egg. 

Emergence involves both destruction and creation. It therefore must hold both the excitement of the new and regret, both joy and grief. 

My own life has moved through several transformations. I have emerged into new professional incarnations three times, into three marriages as well, each of those transformations was painful as well as exciting and joyful. Those heart breaks have never left me. They remain in body memory.  

But it was the final breaking out of a singular reliance on self and into trust in the Spirit…it was that breaking and that emergence that I look back on now as most formative, most shaping in my adult life. That transformation, that emergence was my conversion experience. 

Rev. Victoria Safford, in Map of the Journey in Progress, writes in part: 

“Here’s a place, a murky puddle, where I have stumbled more than once and fallen. I don’t know yet what to learn there. 

“On this site I was outraged and the rage sustains me still; it clarifies my seeing. 

“And here’s where I was told that something was wrong with my eyes, that I see the world strangely, and here’s where I said, ‘Yes, I know, I walk in beauty.’ 

“Here is where I began to look with my own eyes and listen with my own ears and sing my own song, shaky as it is. 

“Here is where, if by surgeon’s knife, my heart was opened up—and here, and here, and here, and here. These are the landmarks of conversion.” 

There is choice in these changes. A change of heart does not require amnesia. We do not need to forget the past in order to move forward.  

Perhaps Victoria is pointing to the truth that Inayat Khan proclaimed, that the breaking of our hearts is part of the process of living, part of the process that prepares us to welcome and find joy in the new… 

I do not want to believe that pain is part of some larger plan, some intention for us. I reject the idea that punishment is required in order to move forward. 

Grief is certainly painful, but it is not punishment. Grief may leave us heart-broken…as a result of our expanded heart’s capacity to hold the truth. 

My experience tells me that grief and joy are “woven fine,” both part of the process of “singing a new song.” 

Blessings, 

Bill