In 2020, you began again with a new minister. In 2020, you began again when The Great Pause kept us apart in person, and we met through our computers and in the outdoors. In 2022, you began again to meet in person at Northland College. In 2023, you began again to build a Religious Education program. In 2024, we are again in a time of unknowns, wondering what the way forward will be as our physical home at Northland College is full of so many questions. If there’s anything I’ve learned about this fellowship, is that we can begin again and find a way, even when we don’t know the way. I don’t know where things will be when you read this article, and given how the news from Northland felt like an earthquake in Ashland, this poem has been a guide for me. I share it with you in hopes that, whether it is because of the current circumstances with Northland, or upheavals in your personal life, it can provide grounding and a way forward, even in tumult.
Fault Line
By Robert Walsh
Did you ever think there might be a fault line passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived in meeting
and in separating, wondering
and telling, unaware that just beneath
you is the unseen seam of great plates
that strain through time? And that your life, already spilling over the brim, could be invaded, sent off in a new direction, turned
aside by forces you were warned about
but not prepared for? Shelves could be spilled out, the level floor set at an angle in
some seconds’ shaking. You would have to take your losses, do whatever must be done
next.
When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing. There’s
your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth, your room, your precious life, they all proceed from love, the ground on which we walk together.
—With Love, Rev. Stacy Craig