Transitions: All Seasons
Summer/Fall 2024
Through this series I’ve given some suggestions of ways to manage transitions. Slow down. Pay closer attention. Allow yourself grace. Consider how you’ve handled previous transitions. The fact of the matter is that transitions are going to keep coming. Life does not stay even keel; it has ups and downs. We do not stay even keel, either. Emotions and seasons come and go. We weather the transitions, sometimes pretty well, other times, not so well.
One person who gained a reputation for weathering seasons well is Sir Thomas More. His contemporary, the grammarian Robert Whittington, wrote about him,
“More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”
Whittington wrote this description in 1520, almost ten years before More became King Henry VIII’s chief advisor, living through the tumultuous years of the monarch breaking off from the Roman Catholic Church and establishing the Church of England. However, More refused to take the oath that rejected the authority of the Pope and so in 1535 he was executed for treason. He was known as a deeply principled man, a “man for all seasons,” who stayed true for himself and his beliefs while adapting to the circumstances around him.
I had a conversation recently with someone who shared that their father was fond of saying, “Don’t get stuck in the decade.” As in, don’t get stuck in a particular time period and keep acting like it’s that year. You’ve got to change and adapt to the times, and yet, at the same time, the core of who you are doesn’t change. You can stay true to yourself and put away your bellbottoms and neon colors, at least until they come back in style again. There is a core that doesn’t change, even while the color of your carpet or the way you communicate does change.
For my first Sunday at a new church, I preached a sermon called “A Church for All Seasons,” making the same analogy. Some things in the church do change over the years, including the pastor. Other things, like the foundation of the Church, as well as its purpose, do not change. The specific ways it lives out its mission, however, are going to change over time.
Moreover, in traditions that mark liturgical time, like I do in this Substack, in addition to the seasons that are based around the tilt of the Earth’s axis, there are the liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time.
Liturgical churches will change the colors of paraments (the cloth draped over the altar, lectern, pulpit, and maybe elsewhere) and say different prayers and use different music depending on the liturgical season. However, it remains the same church.
The core doesn’t change, whether it’s a person, a church, or a wider community. Yet we all go through seasons and this is normal. Seasons of loss and seasons of growth are normal, think winter and spring. Seasons of waiting and seasons of joy are normal, like Lent and Easter or Advent and Christmas. Yet you cannot prolong staying in the same season. You can’t make summer last longer, nor can you put off Lent from starting. We do not have control over the change in the seasons, whether external, liturgical, or the internal aging process. Yet we can weather them with grace and courage and dignity, knowing that each transition is only for a time and will not last forever.
Transitions are transient. The season will change. Going through it can be hard. Hurricanes may threaten to drown you. Blizzards may keep you indoors. Lent may depress you and Advent’s busyness may keep you from enjoying the season. Yet we can be people for all seasons, flow with the tide and the times, change with our experiences and personal growth, and still remain true to who we are.