A couple of weeks ago I took some vacation time and went to help my middle son move out of his apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts.  After the furniture was gone, my job--just as my father had done for me--was to sweep all the remaining detritus into the center of each room, remove the change and other small keepsakes, then sweep it again and again until the pile was gone.  It was just short of three years since we moved him in.  He and his girlfriend were trying out living together while they wrapped up their college courses.  Three years later, it is time to move on. 

They are dividing their time between her mom's house back in MetroWest and our house in Farley.  There are still a couple of rooms worth of furniture on the porch.  In fact, I had to collect some of it from the lawn during yesterday's tornado warning.  Life feels like a tornado sometimes. I worry about them and about all of us as we watch the dismantling of what our society once was.  Every day is a hard choice.

Of course, transitions are part of life and we are all forced to be relatively mobile, or at least flexible.  I looked back at what I was writing in 2022 when we moved the boy in.  His big brother was on the AT, finding his own path after COVID. His younger brother was in high school, finally "in person". My posts back then were already filled with questions about the future of The Eliot Church where I served. Maybe not all of the membership understood that, but the signs were there. We could feel the changes in our bones then.  We feel it now, too.

In the American psyche there is this idea of a "home town" where people live their whole lives and where things never change. It isn't real. Maybe a few people manage to stay in the same place, but...they themselves change. They adapt to stay there, even if they don't think they do.  The place they call home changes, too. Heraclitus was right.  We don't step in the same river more than once.  Life rolls on. We can acknowledge the change. We can prepare for it. It is stressful, of course. That said, there are rewards that come with traveling downstream.

These days, though, so many Americans prefer denial. These folks tell stories that demonize the seeming "new thing" and that celebrates a comic-book past. Many of the problems of today are because of this denial. Living a life of openness is the only real way to go.

A couple of days after moving my middle child out of his apartment in Amherst, we moved our youngest to campus.  He transferred from UMaine to UMass this year seeking a better fit. This year the commute from home was much shorter. He also kept his job at a grocery store near his dorm. However...it is still a change. The flow of life is teaching him, too.

We are nesting a bit. This week we went to the Franklin County Fair in Greenfield.  The fairgrounds are just up the hill from 2nd Church where I serve. I love fairs.  I have been going to them all my life.  Each one is unique, but so much of it was familiar, too. I was never a midway person. I spent my time in the agricultural section like I always have. The county fair draws all kinds of people who these days would never rub shoulders otherwise. We don't have many places like it. Do we talk to each other? Not really.  However, we do have to see each other at least...

Anyway, it was a step toward making space in a new place. All this moving and changing over the past three years has been a lot. It would be good to get settled a bit in this landscape we know through hiking, but that we have never inhabited for an extended period of time. 

​The fall has arrived and so we mark the time. Yes, technically one day is like the next and nothing really begins or ends exactly. School is in, but it only ended recently.  The new church year begins on September 14, but we were in church on September 7th. Still...we have to stop and take stock sometimes. These "beginnings" in the ongoing and interconnected stream of life are like the mountains we climb. At the top is the view of where we have been and where we have yet to go. The pause is worth it, I think. Then...we move on. 

After church yesterday we went to see a new friend sing at a local brewery.  It has already become a "local" for us. We humans are good at building patterns. Some of those patterns can help us make a home in a new place, or accept new people to our old places. We stay connected through the story of how we got there and where we are going. These are good instincts to have. May we always operate in this way when we can, fighting back the fear of the new. If we do, we can see what glorious opportunities await.

I haven't posted here since October.  It isn't that I didn't have things to say!  It is just that there has been a lot going on.  Also, at sensitive times in an institution like the church, it is important not to over speak.  My last post was about the Eliot Church downsizing their staff and what that meant for me.  A great deal was pretty open-ended back then, but now there has been quite a bit of resolution.

Long story short...I am moving. I went into search while looking at part-time options that would have kept me in Natick.  In the end, I accepted a full-time position as Pastor at the Second Congregational Church of Greenfield Massachusetts.  I am in the process of buying a house in Franklin County.  Allison and I (and to greater or lesser extent the boys) are leaving Natick after over twenty-one years.

This has been a whole process, of course.  Which no doubt I will reflect on when the time is right.  However, I wanted to get back into the habit of blogging and--now that there is some certainly around future and current roles--this seemed to be a good time.

One of the trickiest parts of this transition is saying "goodbye" and then saying "hello".  Part of both processes involve boundaries.  In the ministry there are rules about when, where and how we interact with former congregants.  These rules loosen up a bit over time but right now they are in effect.  That is OK.  When we live our lives in the church we try to promote healthy relationships both when we arrive and when we leave.  Here is the newsletter column I posted for the Eliot Church about how the goodbyes will go through the last few weeks of my time at Eliot and for the next year at least...