© Rev Rex A E Hunt, MSc(Hons)

CHANGE IS… LIFE REFUSES TO BE EMBALMED ALIVE
It is a bit of a truism, I know.
The saying that ‘nothing in life is permanent except change’.
        We grow up.
        Meet new people.
        Move to different places.
        Lose loved ones along the way.

The whole universe is alive and changing,
continually co-creating new possibilities of life.
“The world is a web of changing individuals interacting with, affecting, and changing each other… Change occurs from moment to moment in our daily lives as we are acted upon and act, exercising creative freedom.” (Christ 2003:45)

And there is a school of thought that asserts that
knowing we will not stay the same from day to day, from moment to moment,
“is what makes life interesting and worth living.” (Christ 2003:46)

We have not always thought this.
Traditional western thinking, influenced by none other than Plato,
saw change as equals decay and death.

And when this thinking moved into western religion,
the Divine/g-o-d was seen as ‘unchanging’,
existing totally apart from the changing world.

So some of us sung hymns such as: “Immortal, Invisible, God only Wise”

And  ”You are the Lord, you Changeth Not”

And again  “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand”

But what if any so-called ‘divine plan’ was not written in stone at the beginning?
What if the Divine/g-o-od works in and through the changing world?
        All brilliant, novel, and radical ideas in western thinking and religion?
        All requiring a thorough revisioning and rethinking of religion and theology?

We need a new story of ‘change’.

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The anonymous biblical storyteller we call John, while not a ‘modern’ in any sense of the word’,
is also faced with the need for change within his small community.

So the storyteller invites their exploration through a story of a blind man
and his estimate of Jesus’ words rather than echoing something Jesus said.

Now a couple of things need to be said at the beginning.
Because both biblical scholarship and one’s integrity require it.

This story is not a media report of an actual event.
The subject of the story was not a real person “but a representative symbol.” (Spong 2013:143)

As Bishop John Shelby Spong suggests in his Commentary:
“He stands for the members of the Johannine community, who saw themselves as having once lived in the darkness of not seeing, but having been changed when ‘the light of the world’ permeated their darkness. That light brought to them a new perspective, which relativized everything that they had once assumed was ‘truth’.” (Spong 2013:143)

But this raised another problem for the community.
Such ‘change’ brought with it a real taste of ‘anxiety’.

Spong continues his Commentary:
“Would they simply stave off the threat—[embrace the light or deny it]—and then seek to rebuild their security walls and settle into the known routines of their past, or would they step into the light and walk with courage into the unknown, exposing themselves to the new realities that living in the light always brings?” (Spong 2013:143)

Context is always important when looking at and listening to a story.
And the context in this biblical story is change… a split from the Jewish synagogue.
        Conflict between the Jewish Johannine community
        and the Jewish synagogue leaders was intense.

Result?
Anger. Frustration. Anxiety. Change. Denunciation. Expulsion….
“as religious defenders of the faith are prone to do.” (Spong 2013:149)

In so many words, the storyteller is quite direct…
“If the Jewish traditionalists could not move out of the past… they were choosing to live in darkness, to hide in the religious security of yesterday… to refuse to step into the new life being offered, the new consciousness that invites the world into a new and unlimited understanding of what .life is all about.” (Spong 2013:150, 151)

At any time change can be either a threat
or what makes life interesting and worth living.

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We humans, born from 14 billion years of Earth’s invention, creativity,
and increasing complexity, are the ‘ultimate dream animal’.

Of all Earth’s species, we are the lucid dreamer.
“Through the profound mystery of conscious self-awareness, the human reaches a depth of seeing never before achieved in the history of life; and depth of seeing is depth of being.” (De Boer 2020:1)

Put another way…
        We are the species that sees but doesn’t only instinctively respond to what we see.
        We internalise it
        We engage with it emotionally.
        We seek to find meaning in the moment.
And ‘seeing’ and ‘discernment’ is stepping outside the confinements of a limited experience.

Pulitzer Prize winner. Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was a well known and much loved poet.
Her ability to ‘see’ and ‘discern’ the world in which we all live and are a part,
       was central to her poetry.

Her creativity was stirred by nature, by wonder, by discernment,
        and her poems are filled with imagery from daily walks:
                          shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon, and humpback whales.

Of her philosophy of life another has said:
“Just pay attention to the natural world around you—the goldfinches, the swan, the wild geese. They will tell you what you need to know.” (Franklin 2017)

A poem such as “What Can I Say” invites that ‘attention’…

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

It is a privilege of being human that we are curious creatures
—remember Nicodemus of a couple of weeks ago—
        with a capacity for wonder.

Mary Oliver loved to wonder while she wandered.
Because wonder…
        Opens the door to beauty, “to muse about what fascinates us”. (Gleiser 2019)
        Brings us into the richness and fullness of the present.
        Helps us detox against the frivolous ‘influencers’ of smart phones and selfies.

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By ‘seeing’ more deeply,
by increasing the scope of our sensitivities,
        we will all come to live more deeply
        and love the way this richness of the now makes us feel.

For life refuses to be embalmed alive!

Bibliography
Christ, C. P. She Who Changes. Re-Imaging the Divine in the World. New York. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003De Boer, K. L. “Toward a New Cultural Reverie: A Cosmological Basis for the Ecological Citizen” in Minding Nature 13, 2, 2020. <www.humansandnature.org/spring-2020> Franklin, R. “What Mary Oliver’s Critic Don’t Understand”. The New Yorker. Books. 20 November 2017. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/what-mary-olivers-critics-dont-understand> 
Gleiser, M. “I Wonder as I Wander. Why we need Sacred Places” in Orbiter Magazine, Vol 54 (12 December 2019). (Accessed 21 December 2019)
Spong, J. S. The Fourth Gospel. Tales of a Jewish Mystic. New York. HarperCollins, 2013