Transformation and Process

We are always on the edge of the unknown. We tend to live our lives in denial of this fact, but it’s true nonetheless. We simply do not know with certainty what will happen next. We can dance with statistics or play odds and percentages, but we are still on the edge of the unknown.

The past is churning into and under the future on the edge of this very moment. And it is on the edge of this very fine line that life happens and transformation takes place—if we are awake to what is going on in and around us.

Rabbi Moshe Leib said: “The way in this world is like the edge of a blade. On this side is the netherworld, and on that side is the netherworld, and the way of life lies in between.”

Some things may be etched in stone, but they won’t be etched in stone forever, because even the stone itself is in the process of transforming. When we are aware of and engaged with this process, this “way of life in between,” we are doing the work of transformation.

Catherine Keller is a theologian who writes about process. She describes life as a world of becoming, a “way of open-ended interactivity.” She says: “Faith is not settled belief but living process. It is the very edge and opening of life in process. To live is to step with trust into the next moment: into the unpredictable.”

So what can we do to take this step into the next moment, to live faithfully on the path of transformation?

Process thinker and political scientist William E. Connolly talks about two modes of perception: “We participate in at least two registers of temporal experience, action-oriented perception and the slower experience of the past folding into the present and both flowing toward the future. The first is necessary to life; the second is indispensable to its richness.”

Action-oriented perception comes more easily to us, but we cannot fully appreciate the fullness of life unless we can couple our action-oriented perception with the churning of past into future that takes place moment by moment, on the edge of the knife that is now.

In other words, we must cultivate an awareness that goes beyond “this versus this” (a world of false dualisms) toward “this becoming this” (a world of process and constant change). Always.