From Chaos to Calm: Finding Hope in Transition

I am relocating in a few weeks. My mind is as messy as my garage. My thoughts are piled like my things. They mixed up in a variety of “to-do” lists. I haven’t moved in 12 years. That is nothing compared to how long some folks I have talked with have been in their homes. They relocated happily and lived to tell the story. There’s hope for me!

I was living in the greater Boston area in the early 1990s. One day my phone rang and it was my mom. She said, “If there is anything you think you want from the house, you should come down and get it soon.” That was a surprise! At the invitation of my brother, she was going to move to Germany at the age of 67 to help with her four grandsons. True to her word, she sold our family home of 45 years, most of her possessions, and our family business of 92 years and set off on a new adventure! Here I am, mired in piles, just moving from one neighborhood in Fernandina Beach to another!

I heard a phrase this week that sticks with me. It speaks to my current state of dishevelment as well as to the greater dishevelment we feel in the concentric circles of tension in which we live locally, nationally and globally. It is, “There will be a beyond.”

I captured this phrase from Krista Tippett’s blog, “The Pause,” which she publishes on Substack. She recently returned to the States from a long trip, which included participating in an attempted dialogue between Palestinian and Jewish residents of Israel. She respected that the pain and grief in that room was almost too difficult to bear. Talk of reconciliation and forgiveness was not yet possible, but she noted, “There will be a beyond.”

I pass her wisdom on to you. Ms. Tippett notes that our world is hyper-reactive right now. Everyone's nervous system is distressed. Author Anne Lamott describes the anxiety in her brain like a pinball in a machine. We can relate! While the current fractured political landscape may offer no path forward that is clearly imaginable, there will be a beyond.

Our task right now, two days before our national elections, is to sit with where we are and live into the confidence that there will be a beyond. There are positive things we can do so that we can be in a place to receive what is beyond.

Christian pastor, author and speaker Brian McLaren suggests we tend our inner flames. I think that means do what nurtures you. Anxiety and stress make it difficult to feel fully present. If you can’t be present day to day, try just moment to moment. Try to suspend judgments of yourself and others. Be gentle. Even in our darkest moments, the divine presence is as close as our breath. Taking slow deep breaths is a way to calm down and slow our heart rate and feel present in our bodies.

Rev. McLaren also suggests we be stubborn in our willingness to trust. I can be stubborn about a lot of things! I like the notion of turning those stubborn energies into something positive. I want to be someone who is willing to accept new information, to deepen my relationships and to lend my energies toward healing and reconciliation in whatever form that takes.

Toward those ends, Rev. McLaren quoted another pastor and author, Rev. Benjamin McBride, who says, “We have to be willing to meet each other on the porch in peace, to make room for each other, to listen to each other. Even if, at first, we might be inclined to presume the other person or group doesn’t belong. Welcome your neighbor. Have a conversation. Listen not with a need to agree or disagree, but with an open heart and a desire to try to understand their perspective. You never know what you might learn about this other human being. Or what you might learn about yourself. Our ability to sit with each other in that space, through our differences, is the gateway to radical belonging. It is how we learn. It is how we grow. It is how we become. (Ben McBride, "Troubling the Water: The Urgent Work of Radical Belonging." Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023), 193-194.