Seasons of Change

Fall, the season of change, can motivate us to think about the good directions we want our lives to go in and the changes necessary to make that happen.

By Rev. Frank Majka, S.J.
associate director, University Ministry

A few weeks ago, while walking along Wisconsin Avenue, I noticed a very odd thing. On my side of the street it was raining, while across the avenue it was not. The demarcation line went right down the middle of the street. Everything north of it was wet but everything south of it was dry.

This unusual experience got me thinking about boundaries and borders, and how clear or fuzzy they are. Some are very clear. Going to British Columbia, for example, one crosses the international boundary in Washington state; north of the line is Canada and south is the United States. In our society, people become legal adults on their 18th birthday; after their wedding vows, a man and woman are no longer single; after ordination, a seminarian is a priest.

While the moments we pass some boundaries are clear, many passages in life are not so obvious. For instance, I couldn’t tell you exactly when I became a real adult (especially since I sometimes feel like an adolescent when I am driving a car with the windows down, singing along with the oldies station). Likewise, when do a man and woman become truly one, a new doctor become a real healer, a teacher become a genuine educator, a parent become a real mother or father, an ordained person become a real priest? The transitions aren’t always clear.

There is often imprecision in a shift in one’s faith, too. We may find that the God we once believed in is not the God we believe in now, that our way of praying differs from what it was a year ago, that our commitments to the church are not the same as they had been. We can find ourselves in different places in our faith — maybe for the better, maybe not. It’s quite possible though that we don’t know when or how the change occurred.

Fall, the season of change, can motivate us to think about the good directions we want our lives to go in and the changes necessary to make that happen. But we can also pray that we’ll let God’s spirit carry us where God wants us to be, even if we don’t know where that is or when we’ll cross the boundaries.