Embracing the New and the Old

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After the newspaper I worked for went from being a family-operated business to belonging to a corporate giant, the new company sent in a series of corporate employee relations people to bring employees around to the thinking of their new bosses.

Predictably, there was some resistance. Change is seldom easy, especially when you have no input in the change or when reasons for the change – discussed and agreed upon behind closed corporate doors – are inadequately explained.

I recall a meeting the new head of ER had with employees, then over 500 strong. “The train is leaving the station,” he said. “You’d better be on it.”

The threat was hard to miss. But the question I was left with was about the value of change. Yes, change is inevitable, but not every change. And not all change is beneficial. Should people embrace just any proposed change? Well, yes, the ER head implied, if you want to keep your job!

Resist, No Matter What

There is no doubt, however, that many of us resist change, no matter what. Is that more the case with religious people? Maybe. After all, Christians and Jews, at least, base their faith on God’s revelation in the Bible, and Christians on the promise that Jesus would always be guiding his church. That implies immutability.

But it fails to allow for growth. It never fails to amaze me how my fellow Catholics cling to old ways of believing and thinking no matter what, as if God had stopped guiding us. In many parishes, for instance, there’s no evidence that the Second Vatican Council occurred or that Francis – who is trying to help the church grow – is now the pope.

I’m not talking here about “change for changes’ sake,” about changing fundamental beliefs. The church’s mission, after all, is to “proclaim the good news of the gospel.” But the way that is done should conform to the needs of each age. We should be willing to examine our beliefs, separating the essential from the non-essential, and we shouldn’t be apathetic about the millions of people, especially young people, who are turned off by religion.

Eugene Kennedy

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Some would say, “Well, if they disavow the church, good riddance.” But that doesn’t compute with the message of Jesus, the shepherd who would leave 99 sheep to go in search of one who wanders off.

In his book, “Believing,” Eugene Kennedy, psychologist and writer, speculates that part of the resistance to change is due to fear.

“People are reluctant to examine their belief system too closely,” he writes, “for fear that they will find too many inconsistencies or that they may find that they no longer really believe the things they were taught, and then what would they do?”

And that brings us to the fact that many people have the same set of beliefs, and the same amount of knowledge about their faith, as they had in the eighth grade. Many have graduated from high school, college and even graduate school, knowing a lot about history, sociology, the sciences and math but next to nothing about their religion – its teachings, its history, its expectations, its failings.

“…We cannot believe just because someone else tells us to,” writes Kennedy, “and we cannot let somebody else, even if he is the pope, believe for us.”

Learning more, examining our beliefs, makes us, and our beliefs, stronger. But you can’t cram for faith. It’s a lifelong process, and it’s hard to do alone.

Kennedy relates his conversation with the famous psychologist, Carl Rogers, who told him that he “had come to believe that he was wiser than his intellect, that he knew more than he seemed to know.” Maybe that’s because most of us know much more than we are able to express in language or other ways of expression. And as we age, we forget so much of what we have learned.

Hardly Aware

Kennedy says the church is like that. “…The church … has learned so much of which it is hardly aware during its long life with humankind. It is wiser than it knows; it has depths of understanding and a consciousness that has absorbed the symbols and myths of a hundred cultures.”

It has, he says, “the capacity to bring forth new things and old from its treasure of human religious experience.”  

People searching for God, in my opinion, must be willing to do what it takes to learn the language of faith and seek the help of others, and the church, in gaining insight into faith. Such insight will make it easier to be open to change while rejecting the kind of change urged on employees by a new head of ER.