Reinventing Self

June 30, 2023

Some years ago, when I was active clergy and had been at my church for thirteen years, I found myself in a time of discernment about my future.  A fellow clergy person with a thirty-year stay at his church suggested that the key to a long-term, fruitful ministry was to “reinvent” oneself along the way.  He said he had done so several times in his ministry.  “Reinventing” did not mean to become someone else but to take stock of how he had changed over a number of years; how his viewpoints might be different from several years earlier; what might be more, or less, important to him than it was a decade ago; and who did he truly want to be.

I took his counsel to heart but discovered that in my current situation, reinventing myself would possibly cause upheaval in my congregation because, I discerned, I was growing in a direction that they were not.  I waited too late to reinvent myself there, and so out of love for both them and me, I left.

Now, years later, as a poet, I find myself with another opportunity/invitation to “reinvent” myself.  I started this blog during the pandemic, wanting to offer a space of hope, of ancient wisdom, of Divine Love, and of beauty.  After three years, I feel like I’m blowing on a dandelion each time I write, watching the fluff fly away into a void and often not knowing where it lands.  Writers write to be read!  So, since April, this blog space has been mostly on hold and I’ve been in a desert.  What has been taped to my desk since April is a quotation that came across Facebook. I did not write this and I do not know who did, but I thank that person for it:

“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything.  Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t you so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

Unbecoming in order to be.  If I continue this blog, what do I want it to be, three years later?  Which parts of myself do I want to share?  The spiritual?  The personal?  The poetic?  What does the world most need?  What can I offer that is different from every other spiritual, personal, and poetic writer out there?  And, in reinventing (or unbecoming) myself, I have to ask if blogging is still a passion and what purpose it serves for both the reader and for me.  Where does it bring joy, a gift so much needed in these current times?  Do I continue it or do I open my hand and let it go?  It isn’t a comfortable place to be, this liminal space, but it is a place where I can most deeply listen to my heart and to the Creator that resides within it.  It is a place where I can unbecome in order to be.

A poet friend of mine recently shared a poem by Jesuit theologian and poet Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that she thought might speak to me.  Indeed, it did.  I now share it with you, wherever you may be in reinventing yourself.

Summer blessings,

Rosemary

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
excerpted from Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits

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