No to the Unchanging

Humans are not meant to stand still. We are meant to grow and change as we live and learn. If we are not changing and challenging our ways of thinking, we are not growing. Thoughts, beliefs, even rituals need to evolve over time otherwise we are limiting what we can be, how we see the world and who we can become.  

As someone whose spirituality, ritual and faith have evolved greatly over the years, I’ve often been baffled by how people see that as wishy washy. In all other parts of our life we are supposed to get new knowledge and it is supposed to affect the way we see the world. 

Spirituality should be the same way. When we learn how others see spirituality it should help us connect to our own beliefs. Maybe it reinforces them, maybe it challenges them, maybe it helps you see them in a new angle. In any of these cases we step away more connected both from the new things we learned about another’s way of seeing the world and then we put it in connection to our own beliefs and grow.  

It is not a virtue that something doesn’t change over time. Instead, it is a sign of stagnation. It is fine if you choose for your faith to resemble nothing more than a rule book given by some outside source. Just understand this is a deeply limited way for faith to be. Instead, I suggest that faith should be a growing part of our human experience. New ritual, new experience and new thought help us grow and become more aware. 

If someone were to only have the same ideas of science they had at age 5 they would not be very accurate and it would not be considered a virtue. Yet there are faith communities out there who will proudly see their faith as unchanging. It is no more a virtue in faith than it would be in science.  

Unless we can reexamine faith, it does not have any way of being relatable to our real lives. How can an unchanging faith be useful in a world of change? If faith is unchanging, it can’t address things like the new ways we interact, digital loneliness, AI, space travel, politics... Our faith, our spirituality, should be born from the needs of the world we live in not try to ignore those needs. 

Faith must be fluid, changing, honest as we learn new things, willing to atone when old beliefs are found to be hurtful. I believe the divine is a wild spirit that creates and invites us to co-create a more loving, more caring, more connected world.