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Why Can't I Change

by Joan Chittister

The search for perfection, like a mite under the skin, goads us and drives us and makes us ill at heart when we fail to attain what we cannot possibly accomplish.

But we raise the bar beyond the doable everywhere. We want perfect 10s in gymnastics, 300hp engines in family cars, airplanes that fly faster than sound, multiple gigabyte processors in computers.

We push every boundary to the breaking point–and in the case of cars and jet engines and desktop PCs sometimes we even get it.

It’s when we apply such standards to the human soul that things go miserably wrong.

Then we come face-to-face with the flat face of the soul, that part of us that grows only in increments and insights, never by trampolining from one self to another.

This kind of change only comes slowly, only from one struggle to another, only barely.

The spiritual masters, given to whole lifetimes of confrontation with the self, knew it all too well.

Once upon a time, Abba Poemen said of Abba John that Abba John had prayed to God to take his passions away from him so that he might become free from care.

“And, in fact,” Abba John reported to him, “I now find myself in total peace, without an enemy.”

But Abba Poemen said to him, “Really? Well, in that case, go and beg God to stir up warfare within you again, for it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.”

And after that, when warfare came, Abba John no longer prayed that it might be taken away. Now he simply prayed, “Lord, give me the strength for the fight.”

The story brings us up short. It is not perfect peace, Abba Poemen says, that is the acme of life. It is having the character, the commitment to muster up “strength for the fight.”

The real struggles of life are, more often than we care to know, the struggles of a lifetime. They are embedded in us like thorns in the flesh.

They are the recurring jealousies that curdle our souls with the acid of resentment.

They are the petty little angers that accumulate within us and then overflow into all the other areas of life, into our reactions to the demands of the children, to the insinuations of the in-laws, to the expectations of the workplace, even to the claims of those we love.

They are the lusts we damp down and struggle to smother—the cigarettes and alcohol, the food and the smut, the irrational wants and destructive desires that reemerge relentlessly—at the bar, at the computer, at the office, anywhere at all that we take our craving selves.

And we always do.

The thing we fear to face, the thing we aren’t told, is that the struggle with ourselves is the work of a lifetime.

“What do you do in the monastery?” a disciple asked the monk.

And the old monastic said, “Oh, we fall and we get up and we fall and we get up… and we fall. And we get up again.”

It is not the time it takes us to come to grips with ourselves that is the measure of spiritual success. It is whether we ever really admit to ourselves who or what we are that counts.

We may go on for years saying, “Well, that’s the way I am.”

But it is only when we say to ourselves, “That is the way I am and for the sake of the rest of the world I must change” that we have really joined in the contest for our own souls.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime before we even rally enough honesty to begin.

If the question is, “What is wrong with me: why can’t I change? The answer may be that I have to decide to begin.

When the struggle will finally end, what the end will look like, we cannot know. We can only know that beginning to begin is the secret.

From the book Welcome to the Wisdom of the World
By Joan Chittister

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