Inspiration:
If you want to shrink something,
You must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
You must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
You must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
Of the way things are.
―Tao Te Ching, Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Passover
Transformation is at the heart of the two major holidays of this month, Passover and Easter. Passover is the story of how one man, Moses, transforms from a tongue-tied sheep herder into a leader of the Hebrew people. But more than that, Passover is the story of how the Hebrews, a group of people living in slavery to the Egyptians, transformed themselves into the Jewish people, a people with a religion and a relationship with God and eventually a land that was their own.
This transformation of the Hebrew people doesn’t happen overnight. They aren’t transformed the moment they escape from Egypt, or when they reach the opposite shore of the Red Sea that had miraculously opened up to make a path for them. They aren’t transformed when they see God going before them as a pillar in the desert, and they aren’t even transformed when Moses brings down from the mountaintop the stone tablets containing the rules that God has set for them. They’re transformed as they go along, and no one can really say at what moment it happens…
There’s no single moment when they get enlightened or perfected. They just stumble around in the desert for forty years, and over all that time something…shifts. They become freer, more responsible for themselves, more able to be in relationship with God. They transform. Not from bad or stupid people into perfect people, but from Hebrew slaves to Jewish people in a covenanted relationship with their God.
BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP TO READ MORE