Change: God's invitation to growth

Lutheran, The, Oct 2001 by Chittister, Joan

Like Naomi and Ruth, we, too, can be transformed by change

Confronted with the consequences of loss, Naomi, Ruth, and Orpah face great changes in their lives. They can do everything possible to minimize them, to deny them, to ignore them, or they can see them for what they are: God's invitations to development.

Change and loss, it must be realized, are two different things. Loss takes something away from life. Change adds something to it. Loss is a black well; change is a fork in the road. Loss is not an option; it is a necessary and inevitable part of life. Change, on the other hand, is only a possibility. It can be resisted or embraced. It can be seen as temptation or as grace. It can be borne reluctantly or it can be chosen.

A moment of change leaves a woman, in a special way, at the mercy of her circumstances, unless of course she takes it in, is open to it, sees it as simply another step in the unfolding of the self. Then she leaves herself open to works of God in her soul, the likes of which she never dreamed.

Without faith in the God of change, we doom ourselves to the banality of the partial. We become one-dimensional people in a three-dimensional world. We believe in God but we do not believe that God is anywhere other than where we ourselves allow God to be. But life, God, spiritual development, is far more complex than that.

Life is a mosaic. Our years are made up of tiny, interlocking parts. Move one piece in a mosaic and nothing is exactly what it was before. Change the color, the size, the placement of any one of the pieces and the whole picture changes. Add the smallest piece to any aesthetic whole and the piece alters, if only so slightly. Something once part of the way the composition went together is missing now. Something has profaned its original integrity. Something is out of balance. Something new is to be reckoned with. No matter how fine everything else around the new piece seems yet to be, no matter how fine the new piece itself, something of the whole has gone askew, has a gap in it, is wanting.

In the Book of Ruth, one piece-- death-changes the picture entirely. For Naomi, the pieces that took her to Moab, held her there, seemed to plant her there forever-her husband and their two sons-are all gone now. Life is in flux whether she wants it to be or not. She is on her way to somewhere else.

She is the same person who went to Moab-but at the same time she is not. The woman who went to Moab now opts to leave it, not because she planned it that way, but because nothing else was possible for a foreign widow in a society that did not provide for foreign widows. The journey itself has transformed her from wandering wife to wandering widow. Raw but subtle change has come. She is certainly still "Naomi," but she is also certainly not. She is not the Naomi who went to Moab. She is a Naomi in process.

"Willed change," the Sufi [Muslim teachers] say, "is not real. Only unwilled change is real." Only unwilled change catapults us into what we did not plan to do. Only unwilled change really matters to the molding of the soul, to the stretching of the self beyond the self, in other words. And matter it does. Deeply. Willed change is what I seek and shape. Unwilled change is what seeks and reshapes me.

Change is part of every life, true. But the changes that come just from the routine of living, just from the luxury of having lived long enough to see the seasons turn, the changes that come with progressive stages of life-graduating from school, getting married, having the baby, buying the house-- have the ring of commonplace to them. These are not changes that come with the exploration and discovery periods of the human condition.

Change that is real is different. These are the changes that come from life's discontinuities: Corporate downsizing happens, and the work that gave every day's rising a purpose greater than itself ends. The children move miles away suddenly to begin their own lives, and ours, as a result, takes on another flavor. We become ill and the house we lived in for 30 years is sold in favor of the smaller, less expensive, less demanding apartment. The position I wanted and was sure to get goes to someone else, and I am left to adjust or leave. Family members most important in our own development begin to die, a favorite uncle here, a close cousin there, a sister, the partner of my heart. Real change is change that is out of my control.

The change process may be a normal one but it is a painful one regardless. When I was 10 years old, we were moved without warning from one city to another. Young as I was, the ground shook under my feet. My friends were gone. My future as I had known it was gone. I could no longer be sure what tomorrow would look like. I no longer had a set of special moments to wait for, no memories to relive, no familiar faces to count on in the crowd. The world went askew, and we were never again as a family who I thought we would be.

Unwilled change, indeed, takes its toll however promising, however good it may show itself to be in the long run.