Transitions

I talked with Rebecca this morning about how we’re feeling with about 60 days left in Japan before we go home.  In a lot of ways, two months is a long time, but as we said this morning, we have both adopted ways to adjust to change after spending 4 years moving all the time, and we both know that it’s not too early to think about it.

The thing is, when you adjust to another culture (or maybe even just another place), you do some things and make some compromises with your own culture to be able to thrive where you are.  In Japan, that involves some pretty tough challenges, such as willingly letting things go unsaid that normally you’d be quick to point out, or being more concerned with appearances (real or not).  It’s hard work adjusting, and right about the time you start getting comfortable, it’s time to prepare to adjust again–this time, to home.

Recently seeing people wearing jeans and a t-shirt wandering down the street invokes a huge surge of jealousy in me and the thought, “I want to be able to wear jeans and a t-shirt.”  It’s such a small thing, but it’s so big in my mind because I associate it with my own culture and it has been one of my greatest challenges in Japan.  Who would have thought clothes would be so frustrating when I was far more worried about larger issues?  Yet oddly enough it’s the little things that build and build in your thoughts into monsters.

This brings back memories for me of being at Yale Divinity School a couple years ago.  I think I will always remember the first chapel service we had:  we gathered outside the chapel and had a procession inside singing a traditional African hymn while Patrick (the associate chaplain) played drums for us, then once we got inside listened to a welcoming sermon by Siobhan (the chaplain), who poured oil into fragments of pottery that we passed around to use in tracing crosses on one another’s palms.  I can’t imagine a better way to introduce a group of people into a divinity school than that, and I think in many ways that helped us always to maintain a sense of the holiness of the place when daily life would have made chapel feel normal in any other case.  My last chapel was also very memorable:  a Christmas service with candles all around and a sermon by the dean about the meaning of this time of year.  It provided a lot of closure for me before leaving my friends there and returning home.  When I look back at that time, chapel was always the time for reflection on who we are and what we’re doing, and it made transitions to new things much easier.  I can’t remember which writer it was but somebody talked about spending time in a place of beauty and recalling it afterward anytime he seemed to sink into darkness–if I remember right, it was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust and he spoke of sitting down in his imagination and talking with his wife while he was in the concentration camps and how that gave him the strength to keep going.  Everyone should have a place like that preserved in their memory.  I remember the chapel, Ise Jingu Shrine in Japan, my family’s old farm, and (most recently) Mt. Fuji in that sense.

I’m bringing this up just to say that it really helps to have some place, person, or event that works as a point of transition when things start changing.  We all need signs like that to help us move along, I think.