Calculus

The school year has begun and many high school and college students are beginning the study of calculus – the mathematical study of continuous change.
In the present age, if one lives through all the intimate and personal changes from infancy to adulthood, one will continue to experience change in many areas beyond those studied in mathematics.

Much of political rhetoric and personal conversation revolves around the need for ‘change’. Calls for change can be found everywhere. Ideologues of every stripe have a prescription for changes in regime, policy, administration, personnel, et cetera. We all have our opinions about what most needs to be changed.

Even within the Church, we hear calls for change in doctrine or the liturgy, the list goes on and on. Yet one of the foundations of our faith as Christians is the understanding that each of us must change. We are called, like the first disciples, to change from being in one way to being in another. In confessing our sins we are to be prepared to change from sinful ways of life. Repentance reflects this transition.

All of the foregoing was precipitated by my reading the headline in the British magazine website The Catholic Herald, “Catholics Go Out And Change Britian!” It is a bracing piece situated within England’s current cultural and political life. I encourage you to read it not for its subtlety or finer articulation of issues we are unaware of, rather it reminds me of the passion and tone of many of the fundamentalist Baptist sermons I listened to as a youth wherein the Gospel’s saving truth imposes an obligation on each of us as in Jesus’ final words recorded in Matthew’s gospel, “Go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

I suppose we all know, like Heraclitus, the paradoxical permanence of change.  If you are like me you also know how difficult real change is whether personal or social. We often do not want to change ourselves and do not want others to change. So we focus on the change of fashion in external and ephemeral things that will put on a good show. But even then we can be caught off guard like Rilke, who while regarding the ‘The Archaic Torso of Apollo’, found he could not avoid some internal grace of aesthetic beauty emanating from the headless sculpture’s eyes, “for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”