Reshaping Our Lives: Ritualizing the Change
Genesis 28:10-22
I have been trying this past week to find a date in May to celebrate two milestone birthdays with friends. One turns 50 on April 29, and the other turns 40 on May 26. Since we are in the same friend group, we thought we could do a big blowout sometime between the two. What we are finding is that May is almost as busy as December for us. Between graduations, weddings, the end of the school year, and some preparing for church moves, our month is already overflowing with commitments. It reminded me of a book I read a few years ago called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age by Bruce Feiler.
The basic premise of the book is that life is one change after another. Sometimes they are smaller changes that he calls “disruptors,” which we navigate fairly easily. Bigger changes are “lifequakes,” in which everything we thought we knew about life—who we are and the story we tell ourselves—is challenged. These lifequakes include things like the death of a loved one, serious illness, changing jobs, divorce, or moving. He wrote the book by collecting the stories of people who had managed to navigate these quakes and emerge on the other side. As we think about transitions in our lives and in the church, it is helpful to see how these methods of navigating transition are actually found in the Bible. So this week we will focus on several of those methods, starting with ritualizing the change.
Change can be scary because everything feels fluid and uncertain. Predictability has flown out the window. One way that people are able to move forward through the chaos is by marking the change through ritual. Either they embrace older rituals or create their own. As Feiler writes, “In a world with no boundaries, rituals create demarcation. In moments of deluge, rituals provide containers. In periods of shape-shifting, rituals give shape.”
It is a way to mark the end of one way and the beginning of another.
In Genesis 28, Jacob has been sent away by his father Isaac after Isaac gave his blessing to Jacob instead of his older twin, Esau. Fearing Esau’s rage toward Jacob, Isaac sent him away to a different land to start his life apart from all he had ever known. Talk about a lifequake! While on his journey, Jacob stopped to rest for the night and placed a rock under his head. During the night, he had a dream in which God promised him safety and blessing. When he awoke, he realized that his life was completely different. So he decided to mark the place. He took the stone on which he had rested his head and poured oil on it, consecrating it as a place of divine encounter. In response, Jacob vowed that this stone would be “God’s house” and that he would give a tenth of all he was blessed with back to God. By marking this transition with this ritual, Jacob was openly accepting that life would be different now—and that he would be different as well.
We as the church like our rituals to mark transitions. In our Book of Worship, we have liturgies to say farewell to a pastor and to receive a new one. We also have less formalized rituals like goodbye parties and welcome celebrations—both with lots of food. It’s how we acknowledge and mark transitions in pastoral leadership. My guess is that you may be experiencing a lifequake in your personal life. If so, how can you ritualize this change? How can you mark that this change has happened? Once we do that, it can be easier to move into whatever new season awaits us. And like Jacob, let us affirm that no matter what that new season holds, God is with us.
Rev. Dana Ezell
