God is Change
If you’ve had a conversation with me over the last few years, chances are you have heard me share my love of the black science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Octavia, who died in 2006 is as popular as ever, due in large part to her work being held up by young black activists and organizers. Sadly, she passed before she could finish the third book in her “parable” series, but she left us with the two. She wrote these books in the ’80s and yet had incredible prophetic imagination for a future world ravaged by complacency around global climate change.
Octavia Butler
Into the voids of society created by an increasingly inhabitable world, power-hungry and charismatic leaders step in. We are carried through this world through the eyes of a 15-year-old black teenager named Lauren Olamina. At the start of the story, we are with Lauren behind the high and protected walls of a compound, guarding her against the dangers of a post-apocalyptic world outside of them. Lauren is the daughter of a pastor, who risks his life to travel to his baptist congregation outside the walls.
Just a few chapters into the book the compound is seized by outsiders, and she flees into the dangerous and unpredictable country to fend for herself. Each moment in young Lauren’s life is steeped in chaos and uncertainty. It is in this context that young Lauren begins to make grand observations about the world in which she finds herself. In order to make sense of her situation, Lauren begins recording her wisdom into her own Bible of sorts, which she calls “Earthseed.” We get to read passages from this work throughout the series, the central message of Earthseed is this jarring declaration, “God is change.” For the 15-year-old Lauren, the most constant thing in her life was change.
I remember when my Christian eyes first took those three words in. They jumped off the page. Obviously Octavia Butler was borrowing from the Christian understanding that “God is love.” I had to put the book down and take in that suggestion, “God is change.”
Both revelations, God BEING, as in, God IS a thing like love or change is a bit hard to take in if I am honest. I experience love, and so the things I know about love are the exact same things as God themself. I know God better by experiencing and knowing love, because God IS love.
But there was another reason that declaration jumped off the page to me. It felt uneasy for me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Then, one night, I was sitting on the couch watching a football game on TV. The game broke away to a commercial break and there was a wide shot of the Evangelist Franklin Graham walking down a street towards the camera. I found the commercial, you can watch it here.
My uneasiness was the voice of my Evangelical past bubbling up inside me. To my formerly Evangelical ears, “God is Change” sounded awfully heretical.
I didn’t do too much with that uneasiness at the time, but I was kind of forced to deal with that unsettled feeling a few weeks ago. As many of you know, I had a rough end to January. After fracturing one of the bones in my left big toe, a week later I badly sprained my ankle on the same foot. The pain from the fracture in my toe had just subsided enough for me to walk without a limp, and I was feeling like my life was on track again. Then, as I carried a small bin of recycling outside my entire body came crashing down to the ground because of an out of place stone in the driveway. As my ankle gave way, and I ended up on my butt outside, with the now scattered recycling blowing in the wind, I sat there and verbally berated myself.
I said awful things to myself about being clumsy, careless but also cursed my body, for the ways it was messing up and derailing my whole freaking life. I sat there for a good 30 seconds doing that before I set aside my pride and yelled for my partner to come out and help me up off the ground. I crawled up the steps to my bed, where I assumed the familiar position on my back with my leg elevated by a stack of pillows. A routine I was now accustomed to.
I put my arm over my eyes and just felt like bawling. Why was I so upset? Well, this new injury was going to set me back another week. It meant another trip for an x-ray, less than a week after my last one. It meant that my partner would be taking on all the duties of caring for our family, it meant I would be the needy one, that I wouldn’t be able to contribute. The long and short of it, this injury was not in my plans. This was a change I was not ready or willing to receive.
I got real mad about my change of plans.
And gosh darnnit wouldn’t you know it, there came Franklin Graham strolling down that Seattle street in my mind, trying to comfort me with the affirmation that “God never changes.” And then Lauren, surviving in the apocalypse came to me, “God is Change.”
I’ve been wrestling with the competing narratives in the Bible about God and change. As Franklin Graham reminds us, the Bible does say that God never changes, but we also have biblical stories telling us that God has changed their mind. I can see why an unchanging God is an important pillar for Evangelical Christianity. That pillar is essential to holding up the infallibility of the Bible, and the morality that is formed from it. A God who changes their mind is one that can be manipulated. Evangelical Christianity is built on an unwavering foundation, one in which you can stand firmly.
What has really come into focus for me the last few weeks is that because I was formed, as a young person, within this tradition, that it has had remarkable implications for me even now. Change is as real and prevalent as love, and if I can see God working within love, then certainly I can see God working within change.
And I think it is one of the most beautiful aspects of Quakerism, that we know and understand God via our life experience. This idea of knowing experimentally means that we know God via our experiments, our failings, and the relentless reality of change. This core tenant of our expression of faith means that we carry the belief that God continues to speak into our evolving lives, and just maybe the continued revelation of God is leading us here and now, both as individuals are together as a Quaker community. So long as we are committed, we will be completely open to change as it is directed by our listening to the inward teacher. In this way, we see God in the changes we experience. Juts maybe, we know God better by the changes we undergo.
My colleague, klarissa oh recently told me about the importance of novelty in relationships. That it is good practice to work in novelty into our relationships as a way of exercising the muscle of navigating change, but also keeping our senses alive to what is unfolding, to see the vibrancy and power in meeting newness in our lives. I think about what that means for faith communities like ours. What does it mean for us to actively foster novelty, to lean into the vibrancy of change for us? I don’t think this is just a fun question for us to explore, but a vital one. I think some of us have been a part of faith communities, or have departed faith communities that became toxic because of their inabilities to be nimble and open to the potential of change.
And I think we do that every Sunday we gather, and in so many other ways already, but there is power in naming them. While I know that it can be unnerving to gather in the spirit of experimentation on Sunday mornings, it should also be framed as a wholehearted commitment to the possibility of divine guidance and an upending of our plans for something else. I
So, I don’t know if I’m ready to put a name tag on God that reads “change” but I am certainly honing my devotion to communing with God with the wild and beautiful possibilities of change.
Here are some queries reflection:
What has been your relationship with change?
When you think about the possibilities available to us, as West Hills Friends, when we commit ourselves to the unpredictable territory God may lead us, how does that make you feel?
How are you fostering novelty in your life? What does that look like for you?