A Prayer for Culture Cancelers
I don’t like change. I suspect many of you don’t like it either. Change knocks me off stride. Anticipating it makes me fret, and going through it, as I’ve had to do more than 30 times thanks to job changes and residence relocations, is a lot of work and a boatload of worry. Yet change is what life makes us do, it being the one constant that we can neither avoid nor long resist. The earth endures change as it revolves around a star traveling through new stretches of space every day. The very ground upon which we walk is in motion—slow motion—reminding us of its fluidity when earthquakes and volcanoes disturb our assumptions of how firma is this terra. Even the cells in our body are being replaced each day in a process that changes us, top to bottom, every 7-10 years. Our universe is in flux, our bodies are in metamorphosis, and our world is ever in transition.
Why then am I so bothered by those who loudly promote erasing or cancelling what was once taken for granted and rewriting our cultural memories and values? Aren’t they just doing what each generation does, fashioning their times according to their own interests and priorities? Can any of us who grew up in the 1960s not see the similarities between now and then? The times that once were a changing, still are, even if I am more comfortable with old changes than with new ones.
As I become more and more aware that the lower chamber of the hourglass of my life is filling up, I think a lot about the changes I’ve witnessed and endured. Many have created a world that has made my life easier and more complete. Some have added complexities and uncertainties that make me long for the mythical “good old days” of a childhood that memory keeps improving. And others have made me wonder if we are in a progressive, or regressive moment in history.
Change can be unsettling, tapping into two of our greatest fears: uncertainty and helplessness. Change threatens our ability to control what is happening in those spheres of our life where we believe we should be in charge. That may be why so many of us seem to be on the edge of explosive rage or debilitating breakdown in these recent decades where change is no longer gradual but exponential in impact.
In the throes of change I often seek the broader and comforting perspective of the well-known, three-line stanza penned by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1940s, popularly titled The Serenity Prayer. In saying it to myself, particularly in moments when real or anticipated change stresses me out, I often alter the words in this way:
God grant me the wisdom to accept what I cannot change…
The courage to change the things I can,
And the serenity that comes in knowing the difference.
As you can see I’ve inverted the placement of serenity and wisdom, my thought being that, while accepting what we cannot change does bring us a measure of inner peace, it is wisdom that we need if our minds are to opened to understanding our limits when it comes to change. My own life experiences have convinced me that we are constrained by these three “unchangeables” woven into the very fabric of existence.
We cannot change the past ; we cannot alter any of our yesterdays. Rationally, few would argue with this truism. The people who preceded us in time, what they believed, what they did, what they added or subtracted from the human drama is beyond modification. We may celebrate and admire our ancestors or reject and vilify them—we just can’t change them. Rewriting and revising our historical recollections doesn’t obliterate the past—it merely indulges our short-sighted, childlike need to surround ourselves with those ideas that resonate with our own, with those images and stories we prefer to see and hear. Accepting the past as it was, not as we wish it had been, keeps open a door through which we may learn from the errors of judgment, ignorance and self-interest of those who once stood where we do now. Think of the guilt and regret we carry by trying to change a past that, while always in mind, is forever out of reach.
The future is also beyond our changing, because it exists only in our imaginations. Certainly what we do and say today sets the stage for what may happen tomorrow. But we don’t live then—we only live now, in the present. We can plan, plot, dream, imagine, and otherwise sketch the design of the next day, week, month, year or era—we just can’t live in it NOW, hence we can’t change it NOW. Think of the anxiety and worry that takes such a toll on us, individually and collectively, in trying to change a future that can only exist in possibility.
The last thing we cannot change may be the hardest to accept: we cannot change anyone else. I cannot change you, and you cannot change me. We can suggest, advise, instruct, coach, implore, threaten, counsel, manipulate—we just can’t make anyone think, do, or say anything, without their compliance. I know many will not agree with me on this one. With all due respect for the people who had an influence on me in life, from authority figures to those whom I loved to those who were masters at manipulating me—I and I alone have been responsible for the choices I’ve made. Think of the heartache and helplessness we have embraced each time we thought we were responsible for someone else’s habits, lifestyle, choices or decisions, or they were to blame for ours.
What then can we change? That is more simply understood than embraced. We can change ourselves—how we act and react, how we direct our minds on things that are helpful and positive or destructive and negative. We and we alone possess the power to change ourselves, even though that not only takes courage, as Niebuhr well understood; it takes humility, self-discipline, and commitment. Perhaps that is why we are more willing to spin our wheels trying to change the things we cannot, than we are eager to take on the hard work of trying to change what we can: ourselves.
Wisdom, courage and serenity—no trivial petitions these, no fleeting wishes for wealth, fame, deliverance or healing. No genie or leprechaun could magically grant us more, yet no greater answer to prayer could we ever hope that God would utter. At its heart The Serenity Prayer speaks to that one constant which both propels us forward and stops us in our tracks: change.
