Message from Bishop Chilton Knudsen
When I was a little girl passing time on rainy summer days, my friends and I used to make collages. We’d cut out photographs and pictures from stacks of magazines to paste them on large poster board sections in a careful arrangement meant to convey a theme. I can still recall the amazing feeling of stepping back to look at a finished collage, realizing that it did indeed convey a larger theme, wordlessly depicted in paper and paste. And, surprise! The intended theme was there, yes. But another unexpected theme usually emerged as I looked at the whole, viewed from the perspective of some distance.
A bishop’s ministry is a lot like a collage. Drawn from many activities in many places, pictures are fastened onto the poster board which is the life of this part of the Body of Christ called the Diocese of Maine. Sometimes the theme of a collage is really evident only when I step back from it and let my eyes travel the entire piece: Oh...NOW I see it: what it’s all saying...how it all fits together...
This process of stepping back to view our lives in broad perspective makes it possible to see the hand of God at work, as God’s hand shapes the kaleidoscopic bits of life into recognizable patterns. Prayer is one of the ways we "step back" to let the soul’s eyes scan our collage, to discern therein the handiwork of the eternally present One who creates and sustains all that is.
The collage of our life together during the last several weeks holds these pictures (and many are multiple copies; same circumstance in many places):
- Sitting with a vestry which has just learned that the much-loved rector is about to leave for a new ministry,
- Praying with someone whose family member is gravely ill and hovers near death,
- Conversation with a sorrowing one, whose friends have angrily left the congregation where they shared life together in the Body of Christ for years,
- In the presence of just a few family members, I speak the ancient words and inter +Fred’s ashes in the Bishop’s Garden (make sure to look for the commemorative plaque on the wall behind Loring House sometime),
- At lunch after a summer chapel visit, I am shown pictures of the chapel’s life over a number of years. Tears spill down cheeks as we see the likeness of a beloved and departed "pillar" of the chapel’s life, whose absence is fresh and raw this season,
- An email note fairly sizzles off the screen of my laptop, as an angry writer declares with great pain that "the church I knew and loved is gone now".
Each of these pictures participates in one theme: LOSS. Loss, grief, change, transition...all kindle painful feelings of fear and anger, anxiety and yearning. Loss, in all its many forms, is woven through our lives. There is no way to avoid the experience, no way to hold it back, no way to pretend that it doesn’t hurt. The theme of loss is a constant in the human collage. The only way to seek immunity from loss is to love no one, to belong nowhere, to live without attachment — and that isolation (if it were really possible) would be the greatest loss of all.
We who follow Christ, who have been claimed by Christ, whose lives are continually ordered and re-ordered by grace, discover a sacred perspective as we step back into the place of prayerfully viewing the Collage of Loss. We see the cycles of anger and peace, of grieving and going on, of clinging and letting go. In it all, there will be — if we open ourselves to perceive this — a strong but quiet voice speaking in so many accents and tones: I AM WITH YOU. I AM STILL HERE.
Every human bond, every attachment to a specific community, every known and beloved familiarity of life...it will all change. Loss continu
ally reminds us that we live, in the BCP’s venerable words, "This transitory life". The love of God in Christ Jesus is the single absolute certainty with which we travel this earthly pilgrimage. Each instance of loss is an invitation to re-orient ourselves; to re-discover what we need to learn over and over again:In the Word made Flesh, God in Christ entered fully into all that is human — all our loves and attachments, our clingings and lettings-go. In Christ, God’s Word is I AM WITH YOU.
In the losses of life — in all its agonies of change and separation — the invitation is always to face them with an open heart and listen for the reassurance that I AM STILL HERE.
It is so tempting to deny loss, to minimize its impact upon us. We
can deny our loss by blaming others. We can shrug our shoulders and pretend we never really cared. We can avoid feeling loss by walking away ("if you change that, I’m leaving"), or hiding in a thicket of anger, or hurrying on to the next chapter ("just get us a new rector in here as fast as you can, and we’ll be fine"), or clinging to the past ("but we’ve always done it this way!").OR, we can take our wet faces, our angry, unsettled spirits, and our aching hearts into prayer. And there to learn once again that greatest Truth of our lives: "And remember, I AM WITH YOU always; even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20b). Loss will teach us that, if we but allow ourselves to be taught.
In that enduring Presence, I send my love to you all.
+CHILTON