Storyteller's World

Quite a few people in our little Christian community are feeling bruised and wounded at the moment. Some of them are growing elderly and frail, and their mental faculties are not all that they once were. A few have begun to 'wander off', leaving their carers searching the neighbourhood frantically for them. Grown-up children in middle life spend their energy worrying about and caring for parents; spouses grieve for, and have to care for, life partners they used to lean on, who are becoming lost to them. Some dear ones are in process of dying, more or less slowly and welcomely. Others are adjusting to teenage children leaving home for the first time to go to university, or setting up new homes with partners of their own. Others have reached the point of deciding to sell homes they have lived in for many years, that are now too large or unmanageable for them. Whatever it is, many of our people are coping with these life issues, and we weep for and with one another as we try to bear each other's burdens, as well as our own.

It's all about change, of course: the universal lot of human kind. 'Time and chance happen to them all,' as that excellent Old Testament blogger Ecclesiastes put it. I've got a hunch that Christians are not at all well adapted to change, and it must surely be because of our notion of God. Reflecting on this, I found myself thinking of the beautiful prayer at Compline:

Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the silent hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this fleeting world, may repose upon thy eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We hear it so often in debates about liturgy, doctrine, tradition, morality: Christian people are bewildered by the rapid pace of change, can't cope with it, and look to the Church and to God as the things that don't change, that provide them with certainty, solidity and continuity.

And safe is such confiding, for nothing changes here ... says the old hymn, 'In heavenly love abiding'.

The trouble is, it's not safe. Because the Church does change, is changing all the time just like everything else. And does it really help, to believe that God alone doesn't change, when everything else does? Doesn't that just make God too distant from, and unlike, everything else in our experience? So totally alien, that we can't even relate?

I actually think God is dynamic, alive, and apart from being above time (which is a bit hard for me to get my head round) must also therefore be capable of change in some sense. I need to think that he is interested in what I might do because it is possible for him to be surprised and delighted by it, as he sees how this unique work of art he has created in me, turns out. This seems to me to be far more pastorally useful, and consoling, than the idea that somewhere out there / up there, is a Being who is above and outside of change. It seems to me the Taoists have got it worked out better, with their doctrine that the only permanent thing is change, and that there's a constant dance of yin and yang which moves the universe, and as soon as things reach one extreme, they already include the seed of the change to move back to the other. As a 'Christian Taoist', I want to assert that the Triune God is that dance of change. We have nothing to fear from change, or resist in it (or seek restlessly in it, either), because the dance and the stillness is God. We are caught up in it whether we choose or not. So let go! Move with the dance! Let the rhythm and the music take you and move you, in their enchanting, enchanted flow.

Does this help? Not as much as I'd like it to, because many of us have trained ourselves not to be dancers at all, but to 'just sit this one out, I think'.