All Manner of Things Shall Be Well

We are continually swirling in the midst of beginnings and endings, it seems. This weekend, Saint John’s gives thanks for the ministry of The Rev. Amelie Wilmer, an ending of sorts, but one that recognizes that her gifts and ministry is something that has prepared us for the next beginning, with a different priest as spiritual guide.

This weekend is the marker of a beginning in my family, when my niece Linnea marries her dear fiance, Ben. At the same time, we are in the tender time of what may be an ending, the last chapter in my 93 year old mother in-law’s life. We are hoping she will feel well enough to attend the wedding, with her family taking her the two blocks between home and church in her wheelchair, but if not, she can listen to the livestream from church as she sits in her recliner.

Endings and beginnings. The great poet T.S.Eliot, in his “Four Quartets: Little Gidding,” writes: “in my beginning is my end.” We know our lives have a beginning and an endpoint, we know that we go through cycles of putting aside the past and looking toward a different future, we know, in the words of the lovely evening prayer in the New Zealand Prayerbook, “what is done is done, and what is not done is not done. Let it be.”

But there is blessing in the in-between. In the disorientation, and often pain, of endings, there is the freedom to imagine what kind of beginning awaits. Yes, we grieve, yes, we are anxious, yes, we feel confused, but there is a whisper of something that awaits.

There is something yet unknown as Ben and Linnea marry, because every marriage brings its share of things they cannot anticipate. There is something yet unknown as Doug’s family anticipates life without their matriarch, because grief finds its own circuitous path. So it goes, as it has gone forever. But Eliot, as he concludes his poem, ends it with a beautiful and surprising reference from the 14th Century mystic and anchoress Dame Julian of Norwich: “and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well when the tongues of flame are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one.”

So, too, for us, in these endings and these beginnings. The fire and the rose shall be one. All, indeed, shall be well.

Be blessed and be a blessing-

Mary+