The efficacy of change

I set this blog up some months ago with the intention of writing on things that come from my heart, rather than - like most of my other writings - things that come from my head. Subsequently I have had a hard time getting to a place where I felt like I had something to write about in that realm (my heart's been rather preoccupied of late).

But fortunately, for me and for my heart, I was given a "topic" just the other night.

A person very dear to me proclaimed that "people do not change." This is not the first time that I have been, and I expect that it is not the last time I will be, told that change is not possible, or at least highly unlikely. I had a very hard time hearing this the first time it was said to me, and I had a very hard time hearing it the other night.

If there is anything that holds my chaotic life to the ground it is the rock solid belief that change is not only possible but necessary... and inevitable. I don't know whether this perspective comes from the crazy quilt blend of religious faith I have sewn together over my 53 years, or if I have sewn the quilt in order to keep my strange life warm against the cold perspectives of the world surrounding me (it could even be Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, but that's for another blog).

At some core of my being I am a Baptist. I was raised as a Baptist, I came to faith as a Baptist, I was trained as a Baptist, and I even pastored a Baptist church for a very brief period of time. At the absolute center of Baptist faith is the idea of transformation. You not only CAN change your life, but you MUST change your life. A second fundamental of Baptist faith (something that seems to have been lost by the masses of fundamentalist loud mouths passing themselves off as Baptist in our present time) is that each individual is responsible before the God for her or his faith and behavior over time. We are not only asked to change initially, but we are expected to KEEP ON CHANGING. There are some Baptists who still believe this, but they are few and far between.

Laid on top of this Baptist foundation is a deeply, and long, held commitment to Buddhism. A commitment that has on occasion literally saved my life. The foundation of Buddhist belief is the concept of The Four Noble Truths. The Fourth Noble Truth delineates a process (The Eightfold Path)for... you guessed it... CHANGE.

Atop all of this is the strange reality that I was raised by a father who was both a journalist and a scientist. For me, what this means is that I am perpetually curious about new ideas and new ways of thinking and being. I am fully committed to the idea that humanity has climbed it's way out of the muck and mire through a never ending process of CHANGE, and I fully expect the process to continue with me.

This is certainly not a new idea (I very rarely have original thoughts) and one of my favorite expressions of the concept comes from Rainer Maria Rilke in what is my favorite poem in all the world, Archaic Torso of Apollo.

It is interesting to me that the vibrancy and life that Barrack Obama has pumped into our otherwise dead and decaying political process here in the U.S. is also based on this idea, this cry for change.

There is no other way of living, growing, or being. There is one reality in the universe... CHANGE OR DIE.