On Sunday morning, in church, we prayed for people in transitions.  The person who offered it prayed for people going through job transitions, or who were moving, or entering a new marriage, or having a baby, or people who have had a change in health, or have lost a loved one.  It was a prayer that reminded us that any change, even a change we initiate, and look forward to, like the birth of a child, or a new relationship or a new job, brings some turbulence with it. A prayer for transitions seemed like a wonderful prayer, too, for a transition of the season. We’re more than mid-way through autumn, and on the far end of fall foliage; there’s less leaves on trees now, and more on the ground to rake. Today because of the end of daylight savings time, the sun rises earlier by the clock, and sets earlier, and like other animals, I’m feeling the transition, too, moving inwardly towards hibernation, and stillness. In our church, we just passed through the three-day observance of All Saints, possibly one of my favorite feast days in the Christian calendar. In Celtic spirituality, it honors the thin places and thin times, where, as they say, the veil between worlds is very thin, and the passage between them is easier. The Feast honors Christian community and its transitions through time, like birth and death, baptism and burial, the sense of generations rising, dying, rising, walking together through the ages, the extraordinary ordinary saints, perfectly imperfect, graced and in need of grace.  It honors, too, the sense of eternal in the every day; despite disconcerting practices like setting clocks backward or forward, there’s a stability in time, though time is always changing. In church, which has its own strange notions of time, we sometimes sing at All Saints a hymn based on St. Patrick’s Breastplate. While the whole hymn is incantatory and invigorating, one verse in particular speaks to me of the eternal within time, impermanence permeated with ultimate reality:
“I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the starlit heaven,
the glorious sun’s life giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth,
the deep salt sea,
around the old eternal rocks.”

One of the original renditions of this hymn can be found here: http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/p03.html

I bind unto myself today, the beauty of this gentle dawn, the fire of the turning trees, and the quiet of the leaf-fall.