Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island

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Leader Dr. Anne Klaeysen's Blog

Leader's Message - "Farewell" - June 2008

I found an entire literary genre devoted to farewell addresses and innumerable references to leave-taking in plays and poems. It seems that parting is not only “such sweet sorrow,” as Shakespeare put it in Romeo and Juliet, but many other things as well: as many as there are people to write about it. We have been parting in a variety of ways since I first wrote to you in November that my last day at the Ethical Humanist Society would be June 30. What was a date on the calendar back then is now here.

Over the past seven months there have been many conversations about change and how best to manage it. Sometimes it seems that no matter how much time and effort we put into making transitions smooth, they still have some bumps that startle us when they are finally realized. Head and heart have a way of pulling us in different directions.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in.” In other words, the river stays the same though different waters form it. Unlike philosophers of his day who mused on the beginning of the world, Heraclitus focused on the internal rhythm of nature that moves and regulates all things, earning him the epithet “philosopher of the eternal change.” This world was not made by gods or humans, “but it always was and is and shall be.” The soul, he said, is “a spark of the essential substance of the stars.” The underlying law of nature, he believed, manifests itself as a moral law for human beings.

The message that rivers can stay the same over time even though (or because) the waters change is an important one for us. People come and go, making the community what it is, but the community stays. It must. As Albert Einstein wrote in 1951, congratulating the Ethical movement on its 75th anniversary, “Without ‘ethical culture’ there is no salvation for humanity.”

Since its founding in 1950, the Long Island Society has been holy ground to those who have sought the highest. It is not a perfect place: no place is; but it has grounded generations of members in ethical ideals, providing them with opportunities to experience and practice their goodness. Members have struggled together to find answers to life’s challenges and have held each other through life’s joys and sorrows. That will not change.

May the river that is this Society continue to flow with the eternal love of its many members and friends, past and present, nourishing the lives of all who drink from it.

Farewell, my dear friends.

Anne Klaeysen -- May 23 2008 01:07 pm |

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