@HomewithDean - Homily 08/21

In this life the biggest obstacle to making real, substantive, life-altering change is never a limitation of budget, or time, or opportunity. No, the biggest obstacle to change in your life is always you. Specifically, it’s the way you see your situation, the way you define your situation, the way you approach your situation. And I’m not singling you out. We’re all in the same boat. When it comes to change we’re all, more than anything or anyone else, standing in our own way.<br /><br />If any single truth has become clearer to me as I’ve grown older it’s this: We do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are. There’s a principle in physics known as the Observer Effect that describes how, on the most fundamental levels, we cannot help but disturb the thing we’re trying to observe and therefore the act of observing alters the results of the observation. If that sounds confusing, it is, but it’s also true. Let’s just think about checking your tire pressure. You want to know how much pressure is in the tire so you grab a gauge and pop it on the valve stem but in doing so a little air hisses out which of course has just changed the pressure of your tire. That’s a simple version of the Observer Effect. Now expand that truth into your larger life and you’ll discover that when you seek after a thing what you end up finding depends on how you sought it. You find something tainted by your own assumptions. You find your own looking.<br /><br />There’s an old builder proverb, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Take time to unpack it and you’ll find it has a lot to say about our bias, about our small-mindedness and the prejudices it creates, and most importantly … about the dangers of acting from a poverty of options. It’s deceiving because the man with only a hammer knows how to use it extremely well. We could even go so far as to call him an expert. But if he doesn’t find more understanding, more perspective, more tools for his toolbox, then that man is going to use the hammer to do what it wasn’t