Have You Arrived?

Note: This was originally published in our bi-weekly e-newsletter, Liminal Spaces. To get future issues delivered to your inbox (and get our ebook for free!), sign up here.

Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation...Change arrives in nature when the time has ripened. — John O’Donohue

The wind changed yesterday. After six months of cold arctic air blowing in from Canada, the Chinook winds from the south arrived here in Colorado, bringing with them warmer weather and the promise of spring. Winter in Colorado has a way of persisting, often dragging well into April and sometimes into early May, making you believe in winter’s permanence. But thankfully, nothing remains the same. Everything changes. Nothing lasts forever. 

Impermanence is one of the immutable realities of life. It is the essence of all created things. Everything is in a sort of in-between state. We are no longer who we were yesterday, and we’ve yet to become who we will be tomorrow. As Alan Wilson Watts writes, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Or, at least acknowledge everything is changing all the time. Babies turn into toddlers, then teenagers, then adults, then elders, and then die. We fall in and out of love. We get hired and fired. The day dawns and turns into night. The entire universe is in a perpetual state of change. So why isn’t our spirituality?

For those of us who grew up in a fundamentalist faith tradition, spirituality was reduced to a static place of arrival where we cling to certainty and doggedly defend immutable doctrines and dogmas. Why? Because it’s easier—it’s safer. Permanence provides a false sense of security. Staying the same promises protection, even though, in reality, spiritual stasis will eventually kill us, turning our once-soft, amiable hearts into stone.  

I (Gary Alan) recently became best of friends with a recovering heroin addict, and he changed my world. Not only is he more Christ-like than most of my Christian friends, his lived experience invited me to consider how my deeply held beliefs were both rigid and parochial. Everything I thought I knew about the human condition, friendship, kindness, generosity, love, and faith was transformed. But more importantly, he drew me into a deeper stream and reminded me that authentic spirituality and becoming more fully human is the lifelong journey of change, of shedding old beliefs and embracing new ways of being at every stage of existence. In almost every way, he saved me.

Like the universe itself, faith must evolve or it will die. Nothing new can appear until something old dies away. So here’s my question to you. Do you have someone in your life who is challenging the very notions of who you are, what you believe, and how you see the world? If not, find someone like my beautiful friend Noah and allow them to disrupt your stagnant, sacrosanct understanding of life as you know it. Keep moving, keep progressing, resist the fatal temptation to remain the same. And if you find that the ground beneath you is falling away with every step, you’re probably moving in the right direction.

What We’re Reading, Listening To, Watching

Melanie

• Reading: The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr

• Watching: Q: Into the Storm documentary (HBO)

Gary Alan

• Reading: The Gospel of Thomas: Annotated and Explained by Stevan Davies

• Watching: Vikings (Amazon Prime)