More Thoughts On Change

Learning From Our Mistakes

Last week I presented some thoughts on the importance of change as it relates to the writings of Evelyn Underhill. She cogently reminds us “that what is now tradition was once innovation: that the real Christian is always a revolutionary, belongs to a new race and has been given a new name and a new song. God is with the future.” I like that—God is with the future—we don’t have to be afraid of it or of what is coming down the pike. We can resolutely trust in God who is Lord of the past, present and future.

On this matter I also appreciate the writings of Richard Rohr who reminds us that the biblical word metanoia (usually translated as conversion) literally means to change your mind. As a result, he encourages us to maintain an expansive mind so we can pair our thinking with the fluidity of the Spirit’s movement. Listen to Rohr as he comments on the limitations of our ideas about God as opposed to a focus on the person of God (Jesus):

Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him—or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves—us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning form our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.

Rohr goes on to add a pithy point concerning our infatuation with a cerebral analysis of the Godhead:

If certitude, predictability, and perfect order were so important, Jesus would have come in a time of digital recorders and cameras, and he would have at least written his ideas down somewhere—and more clearly! He would have described his task as the establishing of archives instead of a sprawling banquet of rich food and wine, as he consistently did. He said, “I have come that you might have life, and a very abundant life at that” (John 10:10). How did we ever get correct rational ideas confused with an abundant life? (Richard Rohr)

Change, expansion, fluidity, openness, and mystery are far more in line with the Spirit’s work on planet earth than theories based on rigidity, judgmentalism, and black and white thinking.