Romans 12:1-2 - Therefore, I urge you, brothers, on account of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.
We like to believe the way we change is to think things through, apply reason, derive a course of action, set our will, and then act on what we resolve to do. That's the way we're told people work. Rational actors, applying will to a plan, producing consistent action, alone, sovereign, untouched by what lies outside.
However, every scrap of evidence science has laid in our hands tells us "That isn't the way change works." If you ever needed urgently to address your patterns of behavior, you may have directly experienced the emptiness of this model first-hand.
The clash between the science and this, our culture's most comforting and cherished myth, points to the essential flaw in the myth. Whatever our ability to repulse what lies outside, convincing lies live inside. Patterns of understanding, learned early, provide the very language we use to think. No effort of reason can dislodge them, because all our reason rests on them. We need something stronger.
If thinking isn't the path to change, isn't writing a post about the dilemma pointless? Only if thinking plays no role. The above verse suggests we can be "transformed by the renewing of our minds," but it also makes clear this isn't where the process starts. If reason emerges from blood and bone, so does better reason.
Where does the impulse to change begin? Perhaps we see something we know is wrong. Perhaps we do something that hurts ourselves. Or perhaps we hurt people near to us, and hurting them hurts us. While doom-scrolling, wallowing in helpless outrage over the plight of inaccessible strangers, drains us, we can direct our outrage at structures designed to leave us so helplessly isolated. As in law, "wrongs make rights".
So the will to "stop the bleeding" doesn't follow after reason; will emerges from love of some sort, while thought runs to catch up. Our first and best impulse is to act, but what to do? The first action that pops into our head may not be effective. Our action can be downright foolish (but being foolish doesn't necessarily make it wrong, either.) We're more in need at this moment of applying strong love-driven axioms than clear reason. "Do not allow anyone to be attacked and humiliated in your presence." "The most powerful thing one person can do for another is to believe in them".
We may act swiftly and impulsively or slowly and deliberately. Thought can help us sort out what will be more effective, if we resist the temptation to choose what is safest. But if we respond to the situation, commencing immediately, this is the root of substantial choice, of change. Following the dictates of love means doing something, starting now, as "living sacrifices, our spiritual service of worship."
The impact doesn't end in the act, though. Acting on love breaks isolation. By becoming visible, we step into a threatened space and place ourselves at risk beside another. We start to learn the language of other peoples' experience, a glimpse into the world before their eyes. We can't claim, in any single act, to have "been there", only to be there now, an immigrant "fresh off the boat." Acting does not signal deep virtue, but is a first step in "the renewing of our minds".
And this is the real point. The shape of our thinking, the language in which we understand what is happening, is forged in the pattern of the actions we choose every day. At some point, a new understanding takes enough root that our thinking becomes clearer. We can begin to see not only what is wrong, but what is right - "the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God." May it be so.
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