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Clearing the ground
Introduction: where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
The famous late-nineteenth-century painting by Paul Gauguin entitled Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going? sums up the underlying pain and confusion of the world we live in. Gauguin had been a student at a Petit SĂ©minaire, a religious secondary school just outside OrlĂ©ans in France, from the age of 11 to the age of 16. His subjects there included a class in Catholic liturgy. The teacher for this class was the Bishop of OrlĂ©ans, FĂ©lix Antoine Philibert Dupanloup. Dupanloup had devised his own catechism to attempt to lodge his teaching in the minds of the young schoolboys, and to lead them towards proper spiritual reflections on the nature of life.1 The three fundamental questions in this catechism are, âWhere does humanity come from? Where is it going? How does humanity proceed?â Although in later life, Gauguin was vehemently anticlerical, these questions from Dupanloupâs catechism obviously had lodged in his mind, and the âWhere are we going?â question in particular became the key issue that Gauguin asked in his art.
Eventually, disillusioned by life in France at the end of the nineteenth century, Gauguin left for Tahiti to search for a simpler, purer life. His quest did not go well. Several years later he was in despair. As he mourned the tragic death of his favourite daughter, he began this painting. He was deeply in debt and decided to kill himself on finishing the painting. He subsequently made an unsuccessful attempt on his own life by overdosing on arsenic. It was probably in the wake of this attempted suicide t hat he scribbled the inscription in the top left corner âWhere do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?â2
Despite the confusion and pain that flow through this picture, as Gauguin vainly searches for some answers, he manages in both the images and the caption to express something deeply human â a desire to make sense of the world and, more than that, a longing for progress, transformation or change. The urgency of that search has not eased over the past hundred years or so.
People are still yearning for change. Everyone wants his or her life to be better. Everyone wants the world to be a better place. Many people even get as far as realizing that we need to change. But the desire for change and seeing it happen are not the same thing. The problem, of course, is that we look for and pursue change and growth in a world in which disorder â chaos and entropy â is always increasing. In the search for change, particularly personal change, we are always swimming against the tide.
Unfortunately, there is a sense in which â despite the massive advances over the past century, particularly in our understanding of psychology and mental health, when it comes to working out what personal change is, how it comes about and how we can and should pursue and facilitate this change â we are still in a state of confusion. The rest of this chapter will demonstrate this from a range of contemporary studies before we begin our journey through the Bibleâs perspective on this issue.
What is change?
For someone with little or no background in psychology, even the briefest dip into the literature of the science/psychology of âchangeâ is a deeply bewildering experience. Our desire to understand and progress and grow is overwhelming, but our success in this grand project seems distinctly limited.
In his excellent introduction to the science of change, Baylor professor and psychologist Jeffrey Kottler writes this:
Youâd think that after all these years of dedicated research, study, investigation and clinical practice we would have a pretty good idea about what most consistently and effectively leads to change in peopleâs lives. Philosophers, writers, educators, psychologists, neurobiologists and other scientists have spent the past few centuries exploring the factors that produce significant transformations in peopleâs lives, whether they take place in the context of recovery from an addiction, trauma or crisis, solitary reflection, collaborative relationships, travel experiences, reading or listening to stories, classrooms, psychotherapy, religious conversions or serendipitous events . . . The truth is that as much as we might think we understand about what helps people to improve their lives, we have barely scratched the surface.3
We have agreed neither on a definition of nor a failsafe prescription for change.
Kottler is not alone in pointing this out. A 2006 clinical psychology review paper concludes that âwe discovered that the change process is not adequately defined . . . and confusion exists regarding the conceptual distinction between the change process and the psychotherapy processâ.4
In his long and complex book How and Why People Change, US academic Ian Evans comments:
In clinical work, change is usually not what you think it is â if you have thought about it at all . . . Change is not a simple linear process. Change can be spontaneous, dramatic or minimal like an advancing glacier.5
And so the discussion goes on, regularly tying itself in knots, affirming on the one hand that in theory no action is intrinsically better than the alternative (for psychologists and therapists are loath to be judgmental), while, on the other, being sensible enough to work out that some behaviours and thought patterns are deeply damaging â and all the while looking for a theory or system that âworksâ. Despite much energy being expended, the confusion persists.
In a way, personal change is easier to recognize than to define, but Kottler suggests a relatively simple definition of what change is: for him, change âinvolves making something different, either by stopping something youâre already doing that is not working, or doing something new that is more constructive and effectiveâ.6 This is good as far as it goes, but Kottler effectively limits change to the sphere of action. It is a highly reductionist view of what may happen. As human beings, we are interested in more than simply modifying or limiting our behaviour to minimize damage to ourselves and to others, or even simply to promote greater happiness. We want to be different. That is why we need to aim higher.
In this book, I would like to suggest (and work with) a modified version of Kottlerâs definition, which, while clearly being theologically shaped, does not demand a particular view of the source of (or motivation for) change: personal change (or transformation) involves decisively altered behaviour, consistently modified thinking, choices and decisions and permanently reshaped character.
As Christians (and, in fact, as human beings), that kind of positive change (or growth) is clearly desirable. But is it attainable? Can it happen? If so, how? These are some of the issues that will occupy us for the rest of this chapter. But first, we need to think for a moment about why it is so hard to bring about decisive change.
Why is it so hard?
We are not always keen on personal change
Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment writes that âtaking any new step, even uttering a new word, is what people fear the mostâ.7 As human beings, we are conflicted. On the one hand, the prospect of improvement is tantalizing and at times sought (e.g. new relationships, promotions, etc.), but on the other, the easy allure of the familiar pulls strongly in the opposite direction. As a race, we are often afflicted with a high degree of inertia when it comes to personal change.8
We do not think we need to change
In a fascinating paper called âThe End of History Illusionâ, a team of American researchers explains that a series of studies involving more than 19,000 participants showed that people generally underestimate the degree to which they may change in future. They also suggest that this can lead to poor decisions in the present. They present two explanations for this:
First, most people believe that their personalities are attractive, their values admirable and their preferences wise; and having reached that exalted state, they may be reluctant to entertain the possibility of change.9
This is exacerbated by a tendency to think tha...
