Change or Mere Activity

We are responding to a changing world with change of our own - but is it change or mere new activity

Jun 10, 2023

water ripple — Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash

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I have had, like many people in the last few years, a change in my career. The story behind that is too long to tell, but I suppose everyone has a unique story about a change of career, or of workplace, or of life. But speaking just of work, especially in the last few years, a lot of people transitioned to something different. The pace of this change also has increased - changes of work are much more common than they used to be. I initially had in mind that this might be an intro into talking about work - which I think I will do in my next dispatch from The Embassy. But what I want to talk about first is change. There has been a lot of change in work (the Great Resignation ... possibly followed by The Great Regret) ... but there has been a lot of change, in some cases disorienting change, in many if not most aspects of life in the last few years.

It is often difficult for me to remember how things were 10 years ago - by which I mean how different the world is. I'm not speaking of a difference in life circumstances in that time - I mean the world is different. The rise of populism and nationalism and outrage and polarization - the pandemic - the rise of societal unrest of many issues . It is sometimes hard to remember life before these things. The world has changed - us, many of us, most of us - have changed along with it. We have adapted, in various ways, to a changing world - but often the changing world is merely a catalyst, ending the prior self-satisfied (or not) status quo and creating an inertia of change. I have observed in a lot of people I know a discovery of new ways of living or thinking that has been exciting and energizing. In others, a searching, a series of trying things on for size, with something central seemingly amiss - and a sense that, without that central thing, none of the trial runs will work out. Often these people are those that seemed the most set or sure in the "old world."

"It's like a man that's let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows."
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying

Christian Wiman paints a picture of this phenomenon in his brilliant poem, All My Friends are Finding New Beliefs. Here’s how he begins to describe his changing friends:

All my friends are finding new beliefs.

This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.

In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew

God whomps on like a genetic generator.

Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.

Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.

One man marries a woman twenty years younger

and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;

Christian Wiman

All My Friends are Finding New Beliefs

While Wiman appears skeptical (probably rightly so) of the reality or permanence of these new beliefs he friends are finding, he does believe that real change is possible - and that real belief is necessary. That this restless trying on of one belief after another is not a real substitute for some core belief - and that some core belief is necessary. Wiman observes, in a discussion of this poem -

I know a lot of people who think that they don't believe in anything at all, but in fact, everyone has some sort of ultimate concern. It's just a matter of following it out to what it is. Sometimes it's the self, sometimes it's—you know, usually it's the self—sometimes it's God, sometimes it's another person, but it's there somewhere.
Christian Wiman
Poetryfoundation.org

While discovery can be positive, there has to be something central there for it to be more than a new experience. Movement for movement's sake doesn't go anywhere. I referenced William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying above - and this beautiful story of a rough family experiencing upheaval after a life of unrelenting monotony names something of this phenomenon as well.

"I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the stopping and starting."
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying

Once we start moving … then what? Where are we going? Where are we coming from? What distinguishes real change, real growth, from merely new activity? At least part of the answer from what Wiman called our “central concern”. Even changing this central concern is possible, but that is an intentional process - we have to know what it is, consider what it should be - and move.

Sometimes people question how Christians can still be Christian - can still hold to a central, solid set of beliefs - in a world that is changing at such a disorienting pace. Because Christianity and my understanding of God through that lens of Christianity is my central concern - as I understand it is for Wiman - I think that is an understandable question that misses something … well, central.

woman in red and white long sleeve shirt and black pants sitting on floor — Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

C.S. Lewis wrote that unchanging, foundational knowledge doesn’t prevent change, it enables it. Or, without some unchanging element - like an alphabet and grammar - progress isn’t possible to express in written form - it is merely new activity (something most dedicated post-modernists like Foucoult did not believe). Without an understanding of the unchanging axioms of mathematics, no new mathematical discoveries are possible.

In other words, wherever there is real progress in knowledge, there is some knowledge that is not superseded. Indeed, the very possibility of progress demands that there should be an unchanging element. New bottles for new wine, by all means: but not new palates, throats and stomachs, or it would not be, for us, ‘wine’ at all.
C.S. Lewis - Dogma and the Universe

One way I have described what I think is an unchanging element is this Big Story we are in. The story has movement, but not unlimited or directionless movement. The whirlwind of unrelenting cultural and social change doesn’t give us the whole story. There is something that centers all of the above. Some of our responses make sense in this story, others don’t. While this may reflect an understanding of theological dogma, it is the ordinary practices that connect to this story - prayer, worship, service, generosity, love - that creates movement corresponding to this story - faith, hope, peace, wonder, and love. Movement is possible - change, redemption, and restoration lie ahead. But knowing where you are moving from and a where lies the path to this destination is vital.

It is in this context, these practices, these beliefs, this devotion - that we can move, change, progress. It is only in this context that we know in which direction progress lies. Even the most change resistant can acknowledge that change is inevitable. Intentional change - something more than mere activity - isn’t.

No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.

Matthew 9:16-17