Like so many others I am enchanted by the PBS series Downton Abbey. For those of you not yet hooked, it is the ongoing saga of an aristocratic household in England during the early 1900s. You meet and care for both the aristocratic family and their servants, all of whom are treated with much dignity and respect. Of coure, like any other family, both upstairs and downstairs have their fair share of drama.
What has caught my attention is that over the period of a couple of decades we have seen this family move through a great deal of change, watching their world as they knew it fade away. Some, like the head of the household, don't kow how to be in this world and would rather just not think about it or be open to change. Others are embracing it, even as they try to hold onto old customs. The metaphor for change can be seen in the matriarch of the family, played by Dame Maggie Smith. She portrays an elderly dowager, both fierce and loving, who wears black and moves through life clutching the top of her cane.
It is the 'clutching' that has caught my attention and it has made me wonder how we are moving through the change that faces us. Are we holding on for dear life? In deep denial? Or embracing it with all the grace we can muster?
How we embrace it will make all the difference. While most people do not have that bird's eye view of the changing times provided by the Emerging Models Project, we all are facing the changes in our own parishes and dioceses. We do the best that we can in our own place. We keep our focus on following the mission of Christ in Eucharistic-centered parishes that are figuring out how to best serve our own people and neighborhood.
We are being asked to think outside of the box. How we used to do things probably won't work as it did in the past. This is an amazing time to be creative and open to change. The big question for us is this. Are we going to 'clutch our canes,' holding on for dear life? Remain in denial, trying to go back to the past? Or are we going to embrace it with all the grace we can muster?
The decision is ours. Change is inevitable. It just keeps happening.
