Learning

To learn means you change your mind.

Sometimes I hear of people who keep getting into trouble in the same way, over and over. We say, “Will they ever learn?” Will they ever change their way of thinking?

Matthew’s Gospel ends with the “Great Commission”: “Go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“Make disciples.” The word “disciple” comes from the Latin word discere, which means “to learn.” “Make learners of everyone you meet.”

A learner is someone open to changing their mind. Another Gospel word for changing our mind is metanoia, repentance. To repent means to change your mind and your ways of doing things.

The Great Commission has two orders, make disciples and baptize. It doesn’t say “Go out and baptize people by the thousands.” We used to do that, but we have decided that it is not such a good idea. The two orders are sequential, and the second should not be rushed upon the first. By the time you get to thinking about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, you need to have done a good deal of mind-changing.

Learning is dangerous. Changing your mind is dangerous. That’s why some people never dare to do it. I am a life-long Roman Catholic. Maybe I will change my mind about my own faith and become an atheist. Surely there are enough people around who have done that.

The word disciple has a connotation implying that you are changing your mind in a way that associates you with a specific group of people. I change my mind about touching hot stoves, but that learning does not bring me closer to anyone. To change my mind about my faith and become an atheist may also bring me closer to other atheists. This is an important point, because the Great Commission is talking about what we call religion.

Pardon my insistence on definitions. It’s a leftover from my undergraduate days studying philosophy. But the word religion comes from the Latin religare, which means “to bind together again.” Religion is supposed to bind you to other people. It is supposed to create a group. When you change your mind about your Roman Catholicism, that change should have implications about the people you associate with.

Yesterday I was in a conversation about Kamela Harris, the woman that Joe Biden has picked to be his running mate for the U.S. presidency. Someone in the conversation asked “Is she Catholic?” That was a most natural question for a cradle Catholic. We want to know if people are part of our group. When I was young we used to collect names of famous Catholic people in the news. They were part of us.

Sociologists use the term “master status.” A master status is a condition that puts you into a category in the eyes of other people before they know anything else about you. Being an ex-convict is a master status. So is being Black. For some cradle Catholics like myself, being Catholic is a master status. That is true of fewer and fewer people, which means that being Catholic less socially important than it used to be. In my case, being Catholic was a master status because I was growing up in a majority Protestant town, and we felt a vague and delicious sense of persecution. Persecution drew us together, at least in my mind.

The United States has a very individualistic culture. We do not want to be part of any master status. We stand proud, independent, and alone. Nobody tells us who we are. I suspect that when nobody tells you who you are, you get into a perilous state. What is sad is when you are afraid of changing your mind about your perilous state. In other words, you are afraid to “convert”—another word that means to change your mind and your relations with other people.

Conversion, like learning, is dangerous. I might convert to Islam. That would change my master status in religion. Will I do that? I can’t rule it out. If I am really a disciple. if I am really open to learning, to changing my mind, then I must be open to changing my mind about my Catholicism.

Jesus said that the road to the kingdom is narrow, and few there are who find it. Conversions are rare. They tell me that being born Catholic is not enough, that I have to have a conversion experience if I am to take my religion seriously. Actually, they tell me that I have to go through life open to conversion every day.

I like to think of this in the context of prophets. A prophet is someone who calls me to change my mind, and I tell myself that I want to be open to the prophets that God sends into my life. That means most of the people I meet day by day. That is also what obedience means.

As a member of a Catholic religious order, I take a vow of obedience. There are stories of young people being told to plant vegetables upside down as a test of obedience. I never had any teachers as foolish as that, but they did teach me that obedience meant that when I got a letter from my superior telling me to move to another place, I had to obey. Unfortunately, that has only happened once in my sixty-plus years in the Order, which makes obedience irrelevant in my life. But no, when I am open to the prophets God sends me each day, I am obedient in a more radical sense than planting vegetables upside down.

There is a political theorist named Karl Deutsch who said that good political leaders have to stay in the middle between two extremes: bullets and rubber balls. A bullet is programmed to go in a certain direction, totally inner-directed, impervious to change. It travels until it smashes into something. A rubber ball is open to every object it meets—it is totally other-directed. The leader has to be somewhere between the bullet and the rubber ball. I have to be open to changing my mind in conversation with everyone I meet, but I can’t be a rubber ball. I have to know where I am going, but know also that I may have to change direction.

As followers of Jesus, we are called to make learners of people, keeping in mind that we have to be learners ourselves. As we struggle with oher learners, we all learn more what God is like. If and when we come to know that God is Creator, Savior, and Spirit of Life, that somehow God is present in the physicality of our world and in the experience of love in our hearts, and then realize that we share that picture of God with others, we can talk about baptism. Baptism is just a way of making that relationship incarnate, because love has to be incarnate and cannot be lived alone.