Mid-Week Meditation

On my long run the other evening, I was listening to Babyface's "Change the World" as sung by Eric Clapton.  The song resonated with me at the moment. 

I want to change the world.  I get up every morning believing that I can.  I practice law because I believe that I can.  I am in seminary because I believe that I can change the world.  My actions are motivated by my underlying desire to change the world--to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, heal the sick and practice humility in the Stoic sense of the word. 

And, yes, I understand that to have a desire to change the world means that I believe that something is fundamentally wrong with it.  In short, there are not enough people to "love on" other people without motives or conditions.

While Clapton's desire to change the world revolved around his love for a single person, love like that--the kind he sings about, is the kind of love I mean.  Visceral.  Unconditional.  Universal.

And there's no doubt that other people want to change the world like this.  There are any number of organizations and individuals who have devoted countless hours to changing the world.  Even  B.I.G. is noted to to have said that "You can't change the world unless you change yourself."

I love B.I.G., but I hope that he's wrong about that.  I hope that we don't have to change who we are fundamentally in order to change the world.  The scriptures are  full of examples of flawed humans like David, Noah and Solomon who changed the world while still being flawed.  And there are perhaps more examples in the scriptures, in our world, of humans who appealed to an internal system of virtues, were righteous and changed the world without changing themselves.

And I don't mean change physically.  We all loose weight, or undergo a physical metamorphosis.  I mean internally, metaphysically.

The world needs us just as we are--always transforming, always internally the same.