Changing Landscapes

No matter how the landscape changes, love and faith hold everything together in the eternal rhythm of life and death

I was riding opposite the undertaker in the funeral coach as we made our winding and bumpy way through the New Hampshire hills. This was my second year in ministry, in a conservative, evangelical church that had not had a woman pastor before. The woman riding in back had passed on at the age of 101, and having held the funeral that morning, we were on our way now to her inevitable return to the earth. She was a farmwoman, and she quarreled not with such things as life and death.

Lives Touched by Gracious Souls are Eager to Express Their Gratitude

She had been a midwife, in fact, and had a more than usual intimate knowledge of many residents in the county. She was universally known as “Aunt Lora” and in fact she was the biological aunt or great aunt to half the more than 100 mourners who had squeezed themselves into the tiny church earlier that morning. It was an unexpectedly long service since so many wanted to speak about her impact on their lives. She had had a special meaning in my life, too, but (apart from the elegy) I didn't speak on my own behalf, in order to make room for family and friends.

I had come to that church just before Aunt Lora turned 100. I was new to the community, and still experiencing some of the turmoil occasioned by being a church's first woman pastor. When I visited her in the hospital, she turned to me as I entered the room, smiled a smile that radiated from her soul and joyfully announced to the nurse who was attending her, “This is my minister!” At that moment I knew that with Aunt Lora on my side, I would have no long-lasting resistance from that church!

Amid Changing Landscapes, Love and Faith Welcome another Sunrise

As the hearse bounced along its way to the family burial ground, the undertaker pointed to an area bordering the cemetery which was being cleared of trees to make room for new grave sites. There was nostalgia in his voice as he educated the new reverend, “The forests have taken over, but all this was once farmland.” Then and now, farmland and forest. And before the farmland, there had been another forest, peopled by those who no doubt lamented the intrusion of the Europeans who came with axes to clear the land for farming.

How many changes my friend Lora had seen and described to me as she told me about her childhood and youth, her life a young woman, a midwife, a nurse, a worker for church and Grange. But for all the changing landscapes, Aunt Lora had never lost sight of the ”nowness” of life in all its divine splendor. It was that divine nowness which enabled her to embrace the change I represented with joy and anticipation.

Farmland or forest? It's not a matter of progress or change, but a matter of new patterns being revealed as the parts fit together in new ways to form the whole. Aunt Lora's landscape was “knit together in love” as her well-worn Bible declared. It was not Aunt Lora's way to mourn the setting of yesterday's sun. She was wholly given over to welcoming the light, warmth, and energy of a new day.