I Really Do Not Deal With Change Very Well!
There was a time when I used to (secretly) make fun of my first pastor (and mentor) because I saw him as a person who struggled to deal with change in his life. I was the young assistant pastor, newly ordained, fresh from study, stocked full of new ideas and all chock full of ministerial fervor mixed in with an unhealthy dollop of self-aggrandizement. See things with my eyes! I speak for a new generation. My theories will prove more important that your facts or experience. While my place in time prevented me from being a “millennial,” I certainly had my share of a twenty-something’s infallibility.
Funny how life’s journey has now placed me in the role of my mentor. I am hearing new voices uttering untested thoughts and theories even as I hear others holding on to the worldview and world they knew but which may no longer exist. How willing am I to listen to the voices of younger questioning voices? How many of my own presumptions am I willing to give up?
The parish had such an experience a year ago when it undertook the removal of buried oil tanks on the property? What if “back in the day” decades and decades ago there had been any voices warning that burying steel containers (which some day may leak or break apart) filled with an ultimately toxic substance such as heating oil just might not be the best idea. This is not just a parish matter but a planetary concern.
I try so hard to not regurgitate all of my dad’s verbiage – you know, ye olde “when I was a kid…” – but I am living, yet again, in what is supposed to be a winter season in the northeast, knowing that when I was a kid the winters were certainly colder and snowier. No, I didn’t walk to school in snowstorms uphill both ways, but I can easily recall far more single digit temperature days and snowy treks to class (city kids almost never have a “snow day” off in elementary or high school) and having the opportunity to make some money shoveling “old people’s sidewalks.” Something is certainly different and strange going on, and I’d be a fool to shut my ears to those who ask us to take notice.
There was a time when stores gave out plastic bags so that we used fewer paper bags and ultimately fewer trees. Now plastic is bad and paper is good (if you pay for it) but in the end, how are we going to deal with the overcrowding of our landfills? Take a side trip to Utrecht in the Netherlands, and a block from the train station there is a huge plastic “whale like creature” that has been constructed from the plastic bottles and other containers that have washed into Dutch canals and dykes from the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. (This is not the ranting of an eco-terrorist. I saw this “art” disaster sculpture for myself last summer when I arrived in Utrecht.) I know we need to change our thinking and use of plastic, but am I really willing to listen and then change.
I was once a voice insisting upon change. Now I am part of a generation that often does not want to hear others insist upon the same thing. I hope I have not forgotten that this is really not merely an environmental issue or a political issue but a theological issue. Holy Scripture teaches that we have been created in the Divine image. We have been given a caretaker role – to be stewards of “this fragile earth, our island home.” (Eucharistic Prayer C) I often think I hear the words of my Savior telling me: “true, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but if it is broke , then what are you going to do about it? That’s why I put you here!” Are you listening?
-- Fr. Joe