Changes

Rev. Dr. Kate Winters

It is a lovely spring day here on the midcoast. The air is cool, the sun bright, and the bugs have yet to show up. At least, most of them. So I grabbed my coffee, my journal, and my hunter green wide-brimmed hat I bought last year for our “Camp Sunday” in church and went out to our back deck. I spent a little time watching Joel clearing out some brush in front of our woods. He wants to be able to see deeper into the trees, always on the lookout for the wildlife he loves.

I sat down at the round glass table I use as a desk outside. Upon opening my journal, I happened to glance back at the house. I was taken aback. What did I see but an aged woman in a plaid flannel shirt, baggy jeans, and a hat pulled down over her face in the door window. A bit shocked, I asked myself when did I turn into an old Mainer?

I flashed back to our trip out here nearly twenty years ago, sitting at an Italian restaurant talking about our new life adventure. I remember clearly that I had my long hair tied up in a ponytail and was full of youthful energy and excitement. We were moving to Maine!

Where did all the time go? My hair is now about shoulder length with too much grey to be able to call them highlights. Joel is starting to get his Claus beard. We’ve done a lot of living in these years, explored the wonders of Maine from the ocean to the mountains to the coastal and farm towns. We invested our whole hearts in our congregation, celebrated baptisms, weddings, and way too many funerals. Made good friends. Surprisingly, I do not think I’ve picked up the distinctive Maine accent, though I do enjoy hearing a good one in the conversation of the old-timers. But those old-timers seem to now live in me – I look just like them!

Though somewhat shocked by my appearance in the glass door, I am not sorry that I am looking older. Not surprisingly, as I navigate the mid-sixties, I am becoming more and more interested in what it means to get old. To be old, yet fully alive and still growing.

In my graduate school years, I did much of my work studying human development. I was especially interested in work that sprang from Jean Piaget’s discoveries in cognitive development, particularly James Fowler’s stages of faith development. Then, in my twenties and thirties, I was fairly satisfied with Fowler’s take on how faith grows and changes over the early human lifespan. Now, however, I am more convinced of what I only suspected then, that later in life there is something that either goes beyond or deepens his final “Universalizing” stage. And I think it has something to do with our human opportunity to heal the dark night of the soul this world is suffering.

I may be retired from active congregational ministry, but as I see myself in the glass door, I know I am not finished with doing my part to heal ths earth and its creatures. And that I have more to offer.