On transitions: Bishop John McIntyre.

This past long weekend I spent some time travelling through a seasonal rainstorm to see the house of a young person who had just bought their first home. As I crossed the threshold I recalled the first homes of others I had known, for this had much in common with them. An affordable first home is often full of ladders, paint tins, no-more-gaps, carpets in need of replacement and kitchens on the list for determined renovation. It’s a home in process.

            I thought of Janus, Roman god of gates and doorways, who ruled all thresholds including the gate to the gods: prayers to other gods had to go through him, with his double faces, one looking at the past, the other towards the future. And so it is with transitions, directed by our pasts, leading to our futures.

            Big transitions like weddings and graduations may be ceremonies attended by many people, while others may be whisper soft with an audience of one. Some can be planned for; others simply appear, perhaps as a stumbling-block in our way. Not so long ago I passed over the threshold from unthinking health to carefully managed illness, where I was the main witness. Some transitions cross the threshold to the future, like the first day on your first job; others draw heavily on the past, like clearing up the effects of the dead.

            Conversion is of course a transition, from one belief to another, or from no belief to finally getting around to thinking about our relationship to the Divine. Is loss of faith a transition? I’m inclined to think it is not. Maybe if you’ve had a faith to lose, you simply can’t get along with your current Divine-human situation, and have lost energy or intellect for the present. It does take both energy and intellect to hold onto faith, and some people at some times have other things to do.

            While we’re here, I don’t think that when one door closes, another opens. Rather, we pass under the archway from one room or state of being into another, not exclusive of the past but informed by it in memory and reality. In the same way, the future can intrude into the present sometimes in prescient, even unnerving ways.No shut doors: nothing solid in between.

            The great transitions are those Buddha noted as bringing suffering: birth and death. Birth, despite its thrilling manifestations of love and attachment, always leads eventually to death. I think of great spiritual masters who have been taken by death, and of martyrs, whose ends tend to be messily cruel. Of the many family and friends who have gone over the threshold into death, which is thought of as the last transition, the final transformation.

            The ancients thought of the cemetery as a dormitory, where the dead await the transition to life eternal, when the universe attains its end, and all things return to God. This week we lost, suddenly, a valued leader, pastor, and mentor in Bishop John McIntyre. He has gone into the changeless realm, and is free of the constant transitions of our mortal life. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.