Dear one,
This past Tuesday, as I arose, I greeted the pre-dawn darkness: “I’m dizzy.”
With this greeting, I knew that mine was not a sudden rush of blood to my head. No—this was different: as I fumbled to hold onto the bedpost, I knew I was experiencing a “change.”
Could this be a coronavirus symptom? No.
Yesterday, did I eat or drink something strange or unusual? No.
Have I become sleep-deprived? No.
“No,” I realized, “I’m growing … and older.”
Change.
As you well know, change is all about us—on a worldwide scale. The life we knew five weeks ago is not the life we now know: ours is a dizzying loss of rhythm and routine. Overnight, virtually all that we perceived as normative changed; and we find ourselves doing as the ancients did: marking the passage of time, not by a date but by a cataclysmic event: a flood, an earthquake, an infestation … a pandemic.
Recently I pondered afresh the sage observation C.S. Lewis’ senior devil, Screwtape, provided his protégé and junior devil, Wormwood:
“The humans live in time, and experience reality successively … [and therefore] experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy [i.e. God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them … [and] has balanced the love of change by a love of permanence … He gives them the seasons, different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.”[1]
Admittedly, for most of us change is not always pleasurable, but then, neither is permanence. This stated, we do well to recognize that time and the changes which occur within time are not a commodity or “thing” to be managed; rather, they are to be lived. And yet ironically, from an earthly perspective, to die is the final “change.”
However, I do not find this thought morbid or depressing: as last Sunday’s Easter celebration reminded us, I would affirm the Apostle Paul’s words:
“Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed,in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51-52).
Still changing,
Stan
Ps. My Tuesday dizziness is illustrative; it is not a concern …
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (HarperCollins e-books, 2009), loc. 1105-1106.