"Sooner or later, everything falls away."
With these words, author Parker J. Palmer begins his much-loved poem exploring the landscape of loss, grief and letting go in a podcast from On The Way: Parker J. Palmer: Everything Falls Away - St John's Cathedral - Omny.fm.

In this conversation, Parker reads the poem and reflects on the transient nature of reality and the great tapestry that holds all things together. 

I found this podcast to be one of those profound conversations, offering encouragement for the journey of life, which we are gifted in abundance by a generous and loving creator.

Especially when thinking about life and legacy - it was wonderful to celebrate that it is a shared legacy. All the connections that a life makes with other lives, and the connection with creation that we are woven into. This is what weaves the tapestry of meaning, not an offering that an individual makes based on their doings or successes. We thread a legacy together in the relationships we form as community and as God's beloved children together.

This means that we don't need to make anything of ourselves. We don't need to achieve. We don't need to succeed. We don't need to be recognised or praised as having lived well. We don't need to strive to be happy or avoid suffering. We don't need to suppress what we feel and experience in loss. 

Maybe all we need is to surrender and recieve the gifts that God bestows in Love...

All this spoke to the heart of the surrender I feel God inviting me into at the moment, as I prepare for life to change irrevocably while anticipating the arrival of my first child in November. Life, as I knew it before, has already transformed. As my body grows and adapts through pregnancy, it goes on transforming. And ever so gently, I find that I am living a different life to the one I have led so far.

There will be elements of loss in the welcoming of the new. There has to be. That is change.

It is unsettling, and brings up many questions within me:

• Who will I be as a parent? 
• Who is this new little person that I am called to nurture through their first years of life?
• What will it be like to have my routine revolve around a newborn's needs?
• How will I find time to be alone with God in silence with the busyness of mothering?
• What will it be like to not be with my digital brothers and sisters regularly, as I take 12 months out of ministry, to attend to the first vocation of family life?
• What will Mash and Star make of their new human sibling?

All of these questions are valid. And the lessons of the podcast encourage me to offer them up to God to answer, without me necessarily needing to know what that answer is. The living of the questions will be the story that unfolds, and hindsight will eventually offer perspective, that the moment often can't. 

The bravery to accept and recieve, is hard to live, through change. I loved that Parker's poem speaks to this, encouraging us to follow just the thread that is emerging in our own lives, as we will all end up together in the same big picture: 

...part of the great weave of nature and humanity, an immensity we come to know only as we follow our own small threads to the place where they merge with the boundless whole...

Following our interwoven threads we become part of a boundless whole - connected - belonging - cherished. This is after all what we seek to be and do together at HHO in the digital space.

As change transforms communities as well as individuals, we all need reminders to be brave and surrender this process to God, trusting that the big picture will unfold and it will be good. 

I invite you to reflect on how you will put your own 'brave hat' on and let everything fall away (see below images of the brave hats created by our digital faith artists at Pentecost when reflecting together on the changes ahead).

And at HHO, as I prepare to take maternity leave from the 6th of October, I hope that I can make space to acknowledge and accept the little losses, making room for God to love us through them, into the grand future that the Spirit will deliver in God's abundant love.

Things might need to look very different with this season of change inviting us into newness. It might be that some of our people feel uncomfortable with the change, and are just as unsettled as I am, with questions about what the end of 2025 and 2026 is going to look like.

With the support of the Cathedral team, offering their unique gifts to our community, there are going to be new opportunities and chances to try different things in the time ahead. With the ever maturing lay-leadership in our community, there will be innovations and ideas that are worth giving time and energy to explore as we seek to lean into that emergence.

And if we can just remember, and remind one another at times:

It is OK to not be fully comfortable with what is happening around us.

It is OK to feel like we are not in control (becuase we aren't).

It is OK to feel deeply, and grieve the things that fall away.

Because we will find ourselves in the new creation that is made through our participation with God's Kingdom work, that great tapestry which is the "magnificent masterpiece in which we live forever" and it will be good! 

May we be blessed deeply through this time as everything falls away!

You can listen to the On the Way podcast yourself here: Parker J. Palmer: Everything Falls Away - St John's Cathedral - Omny.fm