The business of changing the world
Life, Ecclesiastes leads us to understand, is not about change; life is about sowing. And therein lie both the struggle and the gift. The function of each succeeding generation is not to demand change; it is to prepare for it. The function of one generation is to make change possible for the next. The real function of each generation is to sow the seeds that will make a better world possible in the future. “Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them,” Rubem Alves wrote. “We must live by the love of what we will never see…Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seeds of their highest hope.” Even in the face of the impossible, we must act as if the miracle will come tomorrow. That’s what sowing is about. It requires trying when hope is thin and faith is stretched and opposition is keen.
Sowing is a tedious task whose enemy is the need to succeed. Sowing taxes the energy of the soul. Sowing takes a long, long time. Those who sow must be prepared never to see the result of their work. Results they must leave to a generation of harvesters. For now there is only the long, tiresome chore of starting small seeds in dark ground and waiting to see what, if anything, grows. The process is a long and empty one. No bands blare for the solitary sower. No festivals celebrate the process of imagining.
Tedium exhausts the person of ideas. Telling and retelling the idea to hostile audiences and skeptical friends and outraged neighbors and traditionalist congregations and heartsick families takes its toll on the spirit. “What’s the use…Eat, drink, and be merry,” is the temptation that comes too often, too easily to those whose lot in life is to sow on arid ground.
The spirituality of the sower, then, is the spirituality of urgent patience. They demand for now what others do not even know is lacking. People listen but do not believe or people do not listen at all. It is too painfully true: the business of changing the world one heart at a time requires the courage of the mountain climber who goes alone where none have been to plant the flag of human possibility that no one sought.
The spiritual life of the sower is plagued by discouragement and failure, yes, but tinged as well by wide-eyed hope and unflappable certainty. Sowers envisioned the end of slavery and equal roles for women, for instance, before most people even saw the evils. They see a vision and are blinded by it. They fail and fail and fail only to try again.
Sowers live in the mind of God and know it with surety that what is not good for everyone is not the will of God. They stand immersed in a consciousness of the essential frailty of the human condition but committed nevertheless to the divine dream of humankind, knowing that if God wills it, then human beings are capable of it.
—from For Everything A Season, by Joan Chittister (Orbis)
