I have been thinking a lot lately how things have changed. We have a friend in Austin who is in the property and casualty insurance business, and while visiting him and his family last week he started talking about what was going on in his business, and the conversation carried me back to my own insurance career, now fourteen years past. That conversation triggered my memory and the recognition of how radically different my life is now, and the life of my family. Aside from my change in vocation, many other things have changed, just in the past five years alone: My brother is divorced and remarried; close relatives have died, one unexpectedly at age 53; close friends have died or are dying; my joints ache more these days; my nieces and nephews, all but one, are now adults, with their own adult lives, and also two of our three children are now married; we have a sixteen month old granddaughter; and another granddaughter due this Fall. It makes my head spin, and sometimes I’m frightened by it all. This inexorable change is of course true for all of us, and it is rife with both joy and sorrow. It carries dark and light; despair and hope.
In Hebrew scripture change is everywhere. The people of Israel are forever having to reinvent themselves given new circumstances, new life situations, and God Godself is an active participant in this reinvention. In fact, in Exodus God actually changes God’s mind at the passionate behest of Moses as to whether to kill off the “stiff necked” Hebrews or not. The Greeks however argued that God is not only distant (Jesus being the go-between, the Logos) but that God is unmovable, changeless; the one immutable entity of the universe. To me that makes God all the more unknowable, and through our religious tradition over the centuries, the church has held on to the Greek notion of a distant immutability as pertains to God and I would argue the Trinity as well.
But in and through the world of nature, and the lives of we humans who are contingent parts of nature we are taught otherwise. If we believe the countless verses of scripture which aver that God may be known in creation and in each other (I’m thinking of the Psalms, Job and the Gospel of John) then God is anything but changeless and aloof. Process theology proposes that God affects the created order and the created order affects God. As the creation and we in it live in a world shaped and transformed and renewed by change, then God is participating in such change, influencing it, and being influenced by it, toward some great good, notwithstanding the ambiguities of change… some great good that quite possibly is not fully known to God as it is not fully known to us…. a collaborative improvisation…changing keys, changing chords.
Somewhere in our storage shed is vast footage of VCR film chronicling the evolution of our family. One day we’ll get that film transferred to a DVD and watch and hear what we once were. I suspect that day will be filled with sweetness and mourning as well, because we will stare change herself in the face. I hope I have the courage to embrace her, for change is God among us, ever participating in the renewal of creation and of our lives, which warrant both celebration and grief. Change is coming for us all. Know that it is of God, and do not be afraid.
