Looking For A Constant
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Or so the French writer, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, believed. Was he right, I wonder? Is there some spider-thread connection between the ever-shifting tides of cultural upheaval, and the steady, static same-ness of all things? Does the post-modern quest for the novel and new simply reveal that we exist on the same coin, be it the other side, as those who embody the resurgent movements seeking to reform patterns of life, culture, and religion, back to some romantic notion of yesteryear?
I’m now well past my 40th birthday, and I belong to a generation who were the harbingers of those that followed, each with an ever-increasing, insatiable appetite for change. Every modification and tweak, every hack for life, every embracing of a better way, was simultaneously a ‘looking to the future’, while also a rejection and critique of what had gone before. Whereas change was once a thing to be feared, it is now the prized currency of our culture. We live among a people who embrace change with outstretched arms, never once questioning how we ourselves are being changed in the process. Until now.
How the COVID-19 crisis will truly change the world, only time will tell; we are still well and truly in the midst of full-blown crisis control. Any reflection and introspection is still tainted by the stain of grief, and yet we are just beginning to see the salient issues rising to the surface. Here, in Australia, the public grief has been disproportionately poured out in relation to our national death toll, which is, thankfully, relatively low. Of course, loss for those families and loved ones directly impacted is profound and deeply valid, but what is the broader nation actually grieving? To a large extent, we are grieving a change we did not willingly embrace, one forced upon us. We are grieving the implementation of control measures put in place to contain the virus, not the virus itself. Social media is lit up with the constant lament of what we’ve lost, and the clumsy attempts to embrace the sameness of monotonous routines. Maybe this crisis has revealed something significant in all of us, that for all our hunger for change, what we have truly been thirsting for is some constant on which we can place our feet.
That is why, of all the essential attributes of God (any of which I would be loathed to dismiss), it is his immutability that is so important to accentuate in these days of upheaval. More than simply that God will not change, but that he cannot change, brings a profound peace to our chaos like nothing else can. As he has revealed himself to be—in the towering heights of his perfection, or the deep resolve of his purposes, and the unshakable surety of his promises—so shall he be for all time. When the false-floor of our life begins to tremble and fail, when every security and certainty of our age gives way, when my carefully curated confidence erodes into the night, it is the immutability of my God that I cling to. That he is the God of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, wraps me in unbreakable bonds of love and delight. He is the God of his own self-revelation, a God who made himself known, and is recorded as such for all time and peoples. Yet what hope would remain should he demonstrate himself to be anything other than who he has already revealed? None. All would be lost. That our God changes not is the well-spring of our worship; rightly we declare, “Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father. There is no shadow of turning with thee”.
Maybe Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr was right, maybe it is true that ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’. But this I am certain of, as the hymn writer once wrote:
To all life Thou givest, to both great and small;
In all life Thou livest, the true life of all;
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,
And wither and perish, but nought changeth Thee.
— Walter Chalmers Smith
