Open hands: desiring change & needing sameness.

Most of us are caught in this strange war between desiring change and needing sameness. We want the excitement of a revolution, but we cling to the safety of the status quo. I hate to say it, but from what I see around me, the status quo usually wins. 

A number of my friends have recently been wanting change, but from what I can tell don't seem to be working very hard to make change happen. I see hurt, panic, desperation, complaining and a great deal of suffering, but no movement towards anything new. What appears to stand in the way of change are the pre-conditions and assumptions that the status quo has given us. For example, changing jobs usually is dependent on the precondition of what one earns at one's current workplace. Moving house, as another example, would rely on the preconditions of location, space and cost (to name just a few things).

We attach conditions to change for good reason: change for change's sake is simply pointless. But at the same time, we can impose so many of those preconditions on ourselves and our situations that change becomes impossible. To use changing jobs as an example again: if you hate the environment you're in and get paid a decent salary, you would ordinarily want to move to a workplace that gives you as good a salary but with a better working environment. 

Unfortunately, as often happens, you may not be able to get both. In most cases, as behavioral economists tell us, you would more than likely stay where you're miserable with your acceptable salary: the status quo will more than likely end up winning.

Now, my point about this whole matter is simply this: if you want to receive change, more often than not you're going to need to let go of some things. If you want a Ferrari, you're going to have to let go of a lot of money. If you want to marry, you need to let go of the freedom that singleness gives you. If you want to gain knowledge, you'll need to give up some time with your friends so that you can spend a bit of time reading and studying. If you want to lead a moral life, there are certain behaviours that you will need to change ...

We all have to live with open hands: always expecting to let go in order to receive. In fact, when we live with open hands, the battle between desiring sameness and desiring change turns into a friendly tension that allows us to embrace the best of all possible worlds.

We don't know who we are...

I was out running earlier today, watching clouds build up overhead into a storm that is raging outside as I write this. And on my run, I let my mind wander into an epiphany (or, at least, a reminder of an epiphany that I had a while ago) ...

The mosaic law expressed in the Hebrew Torah was often used by the ancients as way of seeing identity as inextricably bound to what a person does. If you keep the sabbath, don't eat pork and wash your hands and feet in accordance with ceremonial custom, you are right with God. You're on a good track. This has its benefits: identity, as a fairly fluid, misty concept, is much easier to understand when it is tied to tangible outcomes. 

Grace diffuses this concrete way of thinking – diffuses the self-assured nature of the law by pointing out that identity must first be bound to a state of being before it can be bound to a state of doing. Some of my students – designers, fine artists and philosophers in the making – often speak about their future careers in such as way as to give occupation a gravitas that I think is dangerous. I know so many people who choose a job based more on what they want to do than on who they are or what kind of person they want to be. This kind of thinking imbues work with only a temporary kind of value, because if a person gets bored or frustrated with what they do (which seems inevitable) they end up having a quarter-life or mid-life crisis. They end up coming face to face with a rather ugly reality: they don't know who they are. What they're busy doing has lost meaning even though it is not meaningless.

Grace undercuts the law, but does not negate it. It recognises that our actions are important, but also that they are only the surface. You can do good without being good. You can be polite with anger in your heart. You can speak clean words with corrupt thoughts. Grace points out that deeds are simply not enough by cutting through to the core, by telling us to identify ourselves, not by some external concrete system of values, but rather by a change of heart.

All things new.

No matter who we are, no matter about the specifics of we believe, we all know that there is something horribly wrong with the world. To see this is the easiest thing in the world: just pick up a newspaper and read about what’s going on in your neighbourhood. To make matters worse, we all have this acute sense that not only is the world a mess, but that we too aren’t particularly perfect. It’s a messed up world, filled with messed up people. I should know. I’m one of them.

One thing that the Christian Bible teaches in Genesis 3 is that close to the start of human history, a couple of people turned away from what was good by deciding that they knew better than God. And, since then, that’s exactly what all people keep on doing: all of us keep walking away from the good.

Yet, fortunately, we haven’t forgotten what goodness is. Even when we step out of the light, we are acutely aware of what light looks like. This residual good is ingrained in us. It’s built into us, part of our genetic and psychological makeup, and no matter how hard we try to shake it, we all know what is right and what is wrong.

Now, the point I want to get to is this: all of us, fallible as we are, are pretty good at noticing what’s wrong. The problem is, we forget to see that God’s grace is all about making things right, putting this broken world and our broken souls back together. God is all about drawing us back to Himself, bringing us back to Eden.

If we begin the human story at Genesis 3, all we will see is our fallenness (in the form of what St. Augustine calls “The doctrine of original sin). And, certainly, we are fallen. But if we read Genesis 1 and 2, we see that it all starts with a good God who made everything good. And the whole story of the Bible is all about returning to good. Genesis 3 belief calls us to simply get rid of the bad. Genesis 1 and 2 belief encourages us to figure out what a whole, full, joyful life looks like.

The Hebrew word ‘teshuva’ (often translated ‘repent’) simply means ‘return’, and it’s found all over the Bible. Return, like the prodigal son; return like an adulterer who realises that infidelity breeds contempt; return like an addict, who sees that there was a time before that addiction ruined his life. 

Life is not all bad. It's not all a mess. It's just that it's difficult to see the good first without a change of heart.

So return.

Being a follower of Christ isn’t about becoming really good at pointing out how stuffed up everything is – everyone’s doing that. Being a follower of Christ isn't about discovering that there are all sorts of rules that we need to follow to learn how to get into heaven. Being a Christian means waking up to the fact that, in small and great ways, something amazing is happening. Revelation 21:5 records Jesus’ words, which are a magnificent summary of this happening: 

“See, I am making all things new.”

New rules for a very old game.

Imagine a man so subversive that he steps onto a soccer field and tells the referee that the rules of the game don't cut it. After all, he points out, the players keep breaking the rules. They keep tripping up themselves and their opponents. They use their hands when they're supposed to be using their feet. They aim for each other instead of the ball. The referee tells the man that if he doesn't like the rules of the game, he can just as well get off the playing field. You're offsides, the referee says. 

But the man won't leave the field. He tells the referee that he's missing the point.  The ref won't listen. The rules are fine, he convinces himself. The subversive player tells the ref it's not that rules aren't fine, it's just that they're not enough. For the game to be better, you don't need better rules, you need better players. If you want to stop players from fouling each other, the yellow card is always going to be too late. You need to stop the players from fouling each other by instilling good sportsmanship into the hearts and minds of the players.

The ref gets all sarcastic at this point. He tells the man that his ideas are just a bit too 'pie in the sky'. The man says, that's okay, 'cos he made the sky that holds the pie. He claims to have invented this game. The ref gets so angry at this point that he sends the player off. Red card. What kind of a man would claim such a thing? The rules are enough, he says. The rules are enough. 

We just need to keep telling ourselves the rules are enough. Just keep repeating this solid, easily digestible maxim to yourself so that you don't have to face up to the fact that, no matter how hard you try, you're just not the kind of sport that you want to be. Stick to your neat platitudes so that you don't have to realise that they're just not true, or, at least that they're not what you'd hoped they'd be.

Maybe that man, subversive as he may seem, is absolutely, unequivocally, irrefutably right. 

Now what?

You are the message

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) is arguably most famous for stating that the "medium is the message" (in Understanding media, 1964), meaning that no extension of ourselves is ever neutral. Of course, he was specifically referring to physical media – like the light bulbs, clothing and the television – but I would like to suggest that this is as true of our actions as it is of the tools we use to carry out our actions. Our whole being as a projection of ourselves sends out a message. We say something whether we speak or not.

I believe that if we measured the truth of our actions by their consistency with the words we speak, we would often discover some alarming discrepancies. In our everyday reality the message of our words is easily disrupted or misinterpreted because they don't match our actions. I remember a few years ago seeing a television commercial in which an Italian couple was arguing. The woman would say something like "Tua madre è una cuoca cattiva" (Your mother is a terrible cook) whilst throwing a vase full of flowers at her boyfriend. The subtitle would then appear, reading "I love you." The exaggerated incongruity  and absurdity of the whole scene makes it pretty funny, but I wonder if it is not entirely implausible. How many abusive relationships exist because of the detachment between words and deeds? How much hurt do we cause when we say something we mean, but then don't do what we mean to do?

Oddly enough, the primary role of confession in Christianity is not to spend ages beating ourselves up for our inability to live out the truth, but to simply admit that we have not let the message become incarnate in us. Confession is the acceptance of grace, not the denial of it. The word confess literally means to agree, or to say with. It is the admission of truth, whether the truth is comfortable or not. It is equivalent of the Koine Greek word exomologeo, which literally means, to speak out the word or to let the inside be made evident outside. Now, the point I really want to make here is that often the best way to confess – and get the word out – is to live it out. Speak only when your words can match your actions. 

I remember hearing of two friends who had this massive argument. A couple of days later, to say sorry, the one guy went to his friend's house at some crazy hour in the morning, and (without telling his friend about it) began to mow his front lawn. He didn't say sorry ever, at least not with his mouth. But he lived out his apology. This, I suppose, is what we mean when we say that actions speak louder than words, and what St. Francis of Assisi might have meant when he told his friends to "preach always, and only if necessary, use words."