Now and then I encounter people who are surprised that I
decided to join the Mount in my fifties. “It’s such a big change,” they say. It’s
true that, although I have long-time friends in the community and was an oblate
before I entered, I really didn’t know what the experience of community life
would be like for me. L.A. Paul stated the situation well in the book Transformative Experience: “For many big
life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we
change ourselves in the process of doing it. I’ll argue that, in the end, the
best response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to
discover who we’ll become.”
The desire to discover who I would become if I joined the
Mount was a big impetus in making my decision. How would my life unfold in this
very different environment, with both the challenge and support of living in
community? Thus far it has led to a greater discipline in prayer and in writing;
a greater understanding that the nature of God is bound up in relationship,
movement, and abundance; and a greater awareness of the needs of others in the
body of Christ. The discovery was worth the risk.
When you think about it, the older we get, the more we
should be able to risk change, because we have seen in our lives and through
Scripture that (a) God is always doing something new and (b) as promised, God is
always with us. Through change, God offers us a life that is much more fulfilling
than the diminishment, isolation, and stuckness that accompany fear. What
discoveries await you in your next life choice?
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