Transition from ONEING: Transitions
This article is from the newest issue of the Center for Action and Contemplation’s biannual journal. Both the limited-print edition of ONEING: Transitions and the downloadable PDF version are available now in our online bookstore.
Our lives forever shift in new directions,
pulling us like the moon pulls the tides.
For over two decades, David Whyte’s poetry has opened me to the great journey it is to live in this world. Some transitions move slowly, requiring years of patience, waiting for a moment of readiness. It is not unlike the nine months when a woman gestates a seed prior to the minute of birth. All seeds require care. In Italian, the words Dare alla Luce (to give birth) literally mean “to bring to the light.” Every transition shares this same potential. We’re always learning what life can be.
An unexpected phone call in 1976 became a moment of birth for me. A dear friend was visiting, and my nine-month-old daughter Beth was sitting happily on her lap as Marion read to her. I was twenty-eight years old and still finding my way after surviving an accident set in motion by a drunk driver just a year before. My husband and twenty-two-month-old daughter Sarah were both killed, and I was left, three months pregnant, to grieve my lost dreams and face an unknown future.
Now a Connecticut court official was on the other end of the line, asking me, as required by law, how I wanted the driver who had caused this accident to be treated. Implied were the words how harshly. In that moment, I remembered what a Native American elder who gave talks in the town where I grew up said to us one night: “When you speak a word, the sound never stops.”
My husband and twenty-two-month-old daughter Sarah were both killed, and I was left, three months pregnant, to grieve my lost dreams and face an unknown future.
Paula D’Arcy
The court official told me some details about the driver’s life. I asked myself what I really knew about such a journey: nothing, if I was being truthful. I didn’t know if he’d ever been loved, or any of the ways his own life had been broken. I kept thinking about the sound that never stops.
I heard my daughter’s laughter from the next room while the official waited for me to respond. I was certain that Beth would not avoid the pain of growing up without a father; she would suffer that loss. But another realization came to me: That my response to the official was what Beth would inherit from me, her mother. She would inherit the sound of my word.
What I didn’t know that day, but learned years later, was that what I prescribed for the driver I was also prescribing for myself. We are not separate; all life is intricately intertwined. When I asked for the driver to receive help in order to heal, I unknowingly opened that future for myself as well. And in thinking about words whose sound never stops, I felt for the first time a real responsibility in being here and choosing the power of my words and actions, a sense of life’s deeper meaning. Years in the future, a teacher would say to me that the great transition of our times, of all times, is to see what we don’t yet see.
“Struggling souls catch light from other souls,” writes author Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and “what is needed . . . is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more.”1 In 1975, I only longed for my old life, even though I knew I couldn’t have it back. Everything else in my life was undiscovered. I was in between those two places and unable to see any potential that might lie ahead. Yet, somewhere in my childhood, I had caught light from that Native teacher, and decades later the sound of his words helped me make that transition.
I felt for the first time a real responsibility in being here and choosing the power of my words and actions, a sense of life’s deeper meaning.
Paula D’Arcy
Once, on a walking pilgrimage from Paris to the great Gothic cathedral in Chartres, France, I had a dream. I dreamed about the men who had first laid the stones for that cathedral eight hundred years before, pulling them by rope from the quarry and then dragging them for miles to the building site. Just before waking, while still dreaming, I saw myself standing at the newly dug foundation of that cathedral. I heard my name, and when I turned around, the next stone was passed to me.
That stone became a symbol of great consequence for me. I was no longer watching life take place. As I stretched out my arms to receive it, I knew myself to be a participant in the great flow of life, connected to the past but, even more so, to the future. Life is forever in motion and so are we. Everything is in a continual process of becoming. Like the ocean rising and falling in response to the moon, we rise and fall.
Diarmuid O’Murchu speaks about our need to relate to life in a different way, to re-vision what it means to be human, because what it means to be fully human is what we still don’t know. He writes, “Humanity today needs a new mindset . . . a capacity for deep seeing.”
Wanting things to remain the same had prevented me from seeing what was always present: the ability to “add, add to”; to make choices; to evolve as the universe is evolving; to take part in what Joanna Macy calls “the great turning.”
Everything is in a continual process of becoming. Like the ocean rising and falling in response to the moon, we rise and fall.
Paula D’Arcy
In time, I read the words of Thomas Merton (1915–1968): “I was not sure where I was going and I could not see what I would do when I got there . . . [yet] a track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of.”4 I understood Merton’s meaning. Reaching forward had put me face to face with ordinary moments that begged to be seen in their depth.
In the 1990s, I heard author Frederick Buechner (1926–2022) tell a story from his time teaching at Exeter Academy. He described a late afternoon class where the young students were fidgeting and restless. Then, on impulse, he snapped off the classroom lights. As soon as it went dark, the entire sky outside the classroom windows blazed with a fiery sunset. Buechner remembered that for twenty minutes, no one moved or spoke. Afterward, he said that watching the sunset that afternoon was more important than anything else that happened that year. They had moved from the lesson plan and theories about life to life itself. They moved from imagining life to touching it directly, and for that moment they were bound together.
While attending an online global prayer gathering for peace in 2022, I listened to an aid worker tell a story that reminded me of the timeless moment that happened in Buechner’s classroom. She had witnessed something during the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, when the main square in Kiev had just been decimated. One Russian soldier found himself alone in the center of the square facing a crush of grief-stricken Ukrainians. The soldier was in his twenties and caught in a terrible place. The large group of Ukrainians continued to press forward until they formed a circle around him.
But then a Ukrainian woman stepped forward with great dignity, handed him a bowl of soup, and urged him to eat because he must be hungry. The young boy received her offering, gratefully tipped the bowl to his lips, and drank. When the bowl was emptied, a second woman stepped forward, held out her cell phone, and urged the soldier to call his mother because she must be worried sick, wondering if he was alive.
What does it mean to take responsibility for the world, to see beneath the surface of things?
Paula D’Arcy
It’s impossible to know what was rising up in those two Ukrainian women that day, or what transitions might have long preceded that circle in the square. But something of great beauty suddenly blossomed and was expressed. They stood knee deep in rubble that afternoon, the destruction of their city happening at the hands of an army to which this soldier belonged. The grief and pain in life usually seek a swift punishment, not an unreasonable act of love. Acts, adding, adding to, adding more. No one spoke as the bowl of soup was offered within that small circle and bound them together.
There are days, say the poets, when our lives could go one way or another. In the circle in Kiev, the “next stone” being handed to the first woman was the Russian soldier. The stone being offered to the soldier was a bowl of soup. Everything was carried by the one rising tide. And the silent questions echo: What wants to be brought alive? How much are we willing to see? Can we go beyond our conditioning into something new?
Transitions are not about resisting life but awakening within it: Seeing the depth of the ordinary moment until a heartbroken woman facing a soldier reveals all that we might be. Dare alla Luce. Being present to life in a way that accounts for love. Author Stephanie Saldana writes about moments when everything appears different than before, “as if I had been closing my eyes for an entire lifetime.”
Transitions are not about resisting life but awakening within it. Being present to life in a way that accounts for love.
Paula D’Arcy
What does it mean to take responsibility for the world, to see beneath the surface of things?
In July of 2020, I attended a six-day virtual choir festival at a time when no choirs were able to gather and sing because of the pandemic. We watched films and heard talks and one night closed with musician Ken Medema singing the lullaby, “All Through the Night.” He told us that on the last iteration of the chorus, he would remain silent so that hundreds of us, muted in our homes and our countries, could softly sing the refrain ourselves: “all through the night.”
He brought us in with the verse: “Sleep my child and peace attend thee,” then stopped and waited. And at our desks, in our living rooms, sitting on the floor, wherever we were, we sang, “all through the night.”
Again, after “while the moon her watch is keeping,” he held up his hand for our silent chorus: “all through the night.”
At first, I sang along. I turned off the lights in my room, sitting only with the blue-white glow from the computer: “all through the night,” for two or three repetitions, watching people’s mouths move, but hearing only silence. I sang until I could no longer sing, overtaken by the two hundred voices I couldn’t hear, but then did begin to hear, somehow, across thousands of miles . . . although surely I was not hearing with my ears. It broke me. I imagined gulls soaring above the marshes and the sea.
The awakening to love is long and labored: the love which holds the world, which holds the possibility of war and peace, which holds us as we repair what has been torn apart, which guides us to what time cannot touch.
Paula D’Arcy
The silence was strangely more impacting, more intimate, than if I were physically hearing choirs singing in full voice. In that simple refrain, I listened to my own life journey — every place I’d ever been, every disappointment that had been suffered, every betrayal, every transition that moved me to a new understanding of love and responsibility, every time I managed to say yes to life. Every moment, dark or light — the hard-won moments, the drunk driver’s future, and the swell of seagulls overhead — all were stones lovingly placed into my hands with the choice of whether or not to receive them. With each bowl of soup, the world rises and falls, saying, “It’s time to do more, to be better.”
The awakening to love is long and labored: the love which holds the world, which holds the possibility of war and peace, which holds us as we repair what has been torn apart, which guides us to what time cannot touch. The love that is everywhere is in seed. “Love that illumines every broken thing it finds,” writes Jan Richardson. That shift moves us from thinking about “life in general” to an encounter with this moment, this sunset, this swelling tide, this word whose sound will never stop, this transition making way for the next, greater expression of love. Adding to, adding more. “We have to find a wiser way to live,” writes author Jack Kornfield. I agree. This is our moment.
Established in 2013, ONEING is the biannual journal of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Renowned for its diverse and deep exploration of mysticism and culture, ONEING is grounded in Richard Rohr’s teachings and wisdom lineage. Each issue features a themed collection of thoughtfully curated essays and critical perspectives from spiritual teachers, activists, modern mystics, and prophets of all religions.
Paula D’Arcy is an acclaimed author, retreat leader, and speaker. She is the founder of Red Bird Foundation, which supports the growth and spiritual development of those in need throughout the world. Her best-known books include Gift of the Red Bird, Waking Up to This Day, and Winter of the Heart.