Permanent Change

Several of you have already made fun of me for taking my wife and kids to a Rush concert.  But where else are you going to hear great lyrics like those in the epic song Tom Sawyer?  “No changes are permanent, but change is.”

It’s true.  Change is permanent.  So what are all the changes around me and in me doing to me as a person?  I know I’m changing.  But I don’t just want to float and drift like a sack blown in the wind.  I want to become a better, more loving person, right in the midst of all the constant change.

I missed the first several seasons of AMC’s hit series “Breaking Bad.”  Now that we’re in the final season, I’m trying to catch up.

 

The series introduces us to the character Walter White.  We first meet him as a mild mannered chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with late stage cancer.  Scared of leaving his wife and two kids with no resources, he decides to cook and sell meth to make some money.  But when his cancer goes into remission, he continues deeper on his dark path, becoming more deluded and violent as time passes.

Why is this groundbreaking TV?  Because most TV characters remain the same.  They encounter different challenges in each week’s episode, but they don’t change that much.  The writers of “Breaking Bad” wanted to see whether people will watch a show where the character changes.

It would probably be less fun to watch a TV character “Breaking Good,” that is, changing for the better.  But transformation and growth do happen. 

Consider a scoundrel of a character like Sydney Carton, the selfish drunk in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two cities.  He surprises us at the end of the story by heroically changing clothes with the falsely imprisoned and soon to be executed Charles Darnay.  And the novel ends with Carton’s dying words: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”  That’s called leaving on a high note.

Or consider the poem Testament by Ray Carruth.  Using the image of an hourglass for the passing of life, Carruth writes, “The stuff
 of ego with which we began, the mass 
in the upper chamber, filters away 
as love accumulates below. Now
 I am almost entirely love.”

This is a beautiful image, and I hope it happens to me.  But we all know that getting older doesn’t magically transform us into love.

So what is it?  How can we get our heads and hearts around why one life softens and opens up into something beautiful while another hardens and closes down into something sour?

My best guess at this point is that it has something to do with trusting God in a way that turns you towards the future.  If God is pulling forward into something good, then I don’t have to jealously guard and keep what I was yesterday.  I can begin to treat my past with a little playfulness, letting is slide away gracefully behind me. 

It also helps to be surrounded by friends and neighbors who inspire me to imagine the kindness, graciousness, and generosity possible for humans beings like me.  I am not yet "almost entirely love."  But I am changing into something.  And so are you.