Tapping Transformation
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Forty to one. That’s the ratio of sap to maple syrup in the long, slow process of creating the amber sweetness my family used to boil and bottle every spring. It’s a ratio that tells you something about the time and determination required to make syrup, but it gives no hint of the longer arc of transformation that makes it possible.It offers no nod to the long summer days when maple leaves drink up the sunlight. It makes no mention of the way that sweetness seeps into the sap in winter’s deep sleep, slowly settling into the dark interior of trunk and root. It pays no homage to the early spring weeks when strengthened sunbeams charm the sap back up into the branches and crown.
The tree makes its sweetness all year long. We humans show up for a month in the spring to tap it and make a lot of noise about the effort of hauling sap to the fire and the time invested in round the clock boiling to reduce it, forty to one.
Transformation is like that. We make it out as requiring such great effort or such unspeakable miracle that it can seem rare or unattainable. But as every child and parent knows, transformation is as common as a growth chart taped to the wall and marked with a new line every month. Even as adults, we replace our skin cells every 35 days and our blood every 120. In ways both literal and figurative, I am not the same person I was just a year ago.
Transformation, generally speaking, is also neutral. Despite the hint of heresy this carries in a culture enamored by progress and its onward and upward mythology, not all transformation is desirable. Nor does it deem what’s been left behind as necessarily less worthy. Even the youngest botanist knows better than that. The blossom passes no judgment on the seed, and the fruit claims no airs over the blossom.
Still, transformation of the particularly positive kind the change in heart, mind and character known as metanoia does not usually occur by happenstance. Sometimes requiring more patience and persistence than even maple syrup, metanoia is the work of religion. It arises from our ancient human hunger for the transformative powers of love and community, of beauty and truth. In progressive religion, this is not only about seeking personal metanoia, but also the long, slow turning of the world itself toward justice and toward peace.
Can this really come to pass? Will justice ever roll down like waters? Will we find our way to right relationship in our personal lives, in our neighborhoods, and in our world? Many days, it seems the odds are against us, stacked much higher than forty to one. But if it sounds like too much effort or like something requiring miracles too hard to believe in, our congregations teach us otherwise. For whenever and however we gather in a community of faith, we are powerfully blessed by what the early religious communities in New England called an assembly of “visible saints.” It is a sainthood in which each of us presents to one another tangible evidence of the transformative power of faith moving in our lives today. And when we together act upon our faith, within our church or beyond it, we are also making visible the world’s own transformative turning.
This is the work of congregational life to open our awareness of the world as it might be and as it is becoming. It awakens us to the transformation already taking place within us and around us, and strengthens our patience and determination to bring that transformation to fruition. For as the maple tree produces sweetness within the fibers of its being, the world carries its own inner inclination toward justice and peace. May we be willing to show up and do the work of tapping.
- Imagining a Way - September 1, 2020
- Welcoming What We Do Not Want - February 1, 2016
- Where it Starts - January 1, 2014
