FRAGILE IN THE TRANSITIONS [M. 6-28-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

FRAGILE IN THE TRANSITIONS  [M. 6-28-21]

“We are fragile in the transitions.” That’s what a yoga-type instructor told Helen once. “So be careful when you’re changing from one position to another. Take it slow and easy.”

That’s what I’m doing, as we transition from pandemic isolation to… what? We’re not quite sure yet, are we? Whatever it is, I’m going slow about getting there.

It’s hard to find any book of history that doesn’t start with something like “Things were in flux, ripe for change. The old had passed away but the new had not yet appeared. It was a period of transition…” Because that’s the way human history always is.

It’s like what Adam said to Eve as they exited the Garden of Eden: “My dear, I think we are entering a period of transition.”

Natural history, too, except it takes a million or billion years for a species of plant or animal to make a transition. Then only a couple of years for the human species to wipe it out. Plants and animals aren’t fragile in transitions except when they run into humans. Unless they take up smoking.

 

Smoking is a transition problem for people, too. One of Bob Newhart’s first routines has him, as Sir Walter Raleigh, talking on the phone with the King of England, who is questioning him about this tobacco stuff Walt is sending back from the new world. “You do what with it? Roll it up and put it in your mouth? And then you set it on fire?” [1]

Why in the world would people do that? Because stupid people are even more fragile in transitions than regular people. The problem there is, even the smartest people have areas of stupidity in their lives. None of us is totally smart.

[That is the point of John Calvin’s “total depravity of man” doctrine. He didn’t mean that every person is totally without virtue, as he is usually misinterpreted. He meant that no person is without sin in any PART of life. “Original sin,” the proclivity to seek our own good first regardless of what happens to others, affects and infects our thinking and our emotions and our actions, all of them.]

I think that’s why old people are satisfied with small lives, why we are slow to transition out of the pandemic isolation. We know we’re fragile.

I was in a group of old men recently. None as old as I, but they all qualify for senior discounts. They were talking about the stuff they did before the isolation that they are not going to do as we come out of isolation. We got used to living a small-screen life, a Zoom-sized life. A small life is so much easier to keep control of. We don’t have to worry about fragility if we don’t do transitions.

Back when I was the only minister in a cash-strapped thousand-member church, I got overwhelmed. I told Helen about all the stuff I was going to cut out of my schedule to get a smaller life, to make it more manageable, to do all the jobs by myself that really required a whole staff. She said, “But everything you are cutting is something that feeds you. You’re keeping only the stuff that you feed.”

So here’s the point: As you transition into a small-screen post-pandemic life, don’t go back to the stuff that you feed, go back to the stuff that feeds you.

As my cancer guide and much-loved and much-missed friend, Rose Mary Shepherd, once said, “I need to schedule more serendipity into my life.”

John Robert McFarland

1] My father and three of his brothers were pipe smokers. Uncle Randall thought my father was unnecessarily hoity-toity because he smoked Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco, while Uncle Randall was satisfied with the cheaper Prince Albert. I think at the time Raleigh was 15 cents per packet and Albert was ten cents. Poor Uncle Randall was even more horrified when he found out that I smoked Borkum Riff. [Don’t worry; Helen made me quit when I got cancer.]

The cartoon is, of course, from Gary Larson's "The Far Side."