“It is always easy to let the age have its head, but it is difficult to keep one’s own. It is always easy to fall.” (Archbishop Fulton Sheen).
Change is very difficult. It does not really matter what stage of life one is at, whenever a person is asked to change that person will struggle with the exercise.’
Some people – people like me and my second son – struggle more than usual with change.
When my second son started high school, I asked him how he was going at the new school with the new teachers and the new systems and all the new stuff.
And he told me that he did not like it. That he hated it in fact and that he was not enjoying his life at the moment. And I heard his words and understood his message. What he was really telling me was that change was difficult. Nothing was wrong at school. There was no real problem there. Instead, he was just overwhelmed by the change in his environment and that feeling of being overwhelmed made him feel very uncomfortable and therefore very unlikely to be happy in his life in this moment in time.
As time passed and that first term of high school moved on through, my second son became much more comfortable at school, and while he never loved it, there were parts of school that he found very enjoyable. And the reason for that is because the change that had made him uncomfortable had stopped being so frantic and therefore he was able to enjoy the time that he had some more and to live in the moment.
That change – that tendency to move – is human. We are flawed in this changing world.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen said, “It is human to come down, but it is divine to hang there. It would be easy for the Church to come down: To have been Gnostic in the first Century, to have been Arian in the fourth, and to be pagan in the twentieth. It is always easy to let the age have its head, but it is difficult to keep one’s own. It is always easy to fall. There are a thousand angles at which a thing will fall but only one at which it stands; and that is the angle at which the Church is poised between Heaven and earth – and from that angle she overlooks the passing fads and fancies of the ages and sings over them in a deep and sonorous tones a requiem in the language of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, awaiting the day when she shall come down to walk in the glory of her new Easter morn.”
And I have been thinking about that. Because perhaps there is something God-like in our resistance to change. After all we are made in the Image of God and that Image is unchanging. And perhaps there is a secret part of my soul that longs for that eternal unchanging Image and resists the changes that remind me that I have wandered far away from Him… Perhaps…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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