Change and transformation...

There is a difference between change and transformation. Change happens when something old dies and something new begins. I am told that planned change is as troublesome to the psyche as unplanned change, often more so. But change might or might not be accompanied by transformation of soul. If change does not invite personal transformation, we lose our souls.

At times of change, the agents of transformation must work overtime, even though few will hear them. The ego would sooner play victim or too-quick victor than take the ambiguous road of transformation. We change-agents need a simple virtue: faith. It still is the rarest of commodities because it feels like nothing, at least nothing that satisfies our need to know, to fix, to manage, to understand. Faith goes against the grain.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 292

I'm afraid I too easily all into the "victim or too-quick victor" trap myself - and I'm trying very hard at this time of change to be open to the Spirit (the ultimate "agent of transformation") and let him lead me into what he's trying to do, rather than to grab hold of the first solution, the first concrete change, that occurs to my conscious mind.

It's difficult, as Rohr says: faith does feel like nothing to the fixing, managing mind. It's why people of faith so often have a hard time living in the world and not being of it. Faith feels like nothing to the world, and when it tries to name it and understand it, it calls it things like laziness, and muddle-headedness, and subversion. (You only have to read Gandhi's life-story, especially in his young days in South Africa, to see what I mean.)

Our own conscious self, our ego, whatever term you want to use, has a hard time dealing with the work of the Spirit in our hearts, with the symptoms of faith. It - well, mine, anyway - is prone to give bad names to this hidden activity. Maybe that's what Jesus meant when he said there's no hope for those who blaspheme the Spirit? If you reject the transforming work of the Spirit, if you write it off as too ambiguous, as deluded, or worse, demonic, then to whom can you turn? After all, the Spirit is the Spirit who descended upon Jesus at his baptism - and as Simon Peter said, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God." (John 6.68-69)