"To change, to convert? Why bother?"
About this Quote
The sting here is how a clergyman dares to puncture the sacred verb set of religious life: change, convert, improve. Blue stacks those words like items in a spiritual shopping cart, then knocks the cart over with a shrug. The question "Why bother?" isn’t laziness; it’s a provocation aimed at the moral self-help industry that can creep into faith, where the point becomes measurable transformation rather than lived, complicated fidelity.
Lionel Blue wrote and spoke as a rabbi who was also an outsider in multiple senses (not least as a gay man in a tradition negotiating modernity). That background matters. The line reads like a defense against coercive narratives: conversion as conquest, change as conformity, personal reinvention as a demand to become palatable. By pairing "change" with "convert", he implies they can be versions of the same pressure - a polite word for submission.
The genius is the compact rhythm: two infinitives, a question mark, then the blunt dismissal. It mimics the internal monologue of someone weary of being told their current self is a problem to be solved. There’s irony, too, because clergy are professionally invested in conversion. Blue’s refusal turns the sermon back on the sermonizer: if religion is only about fixing people, it’s just another ideology with nicer music.
Underneath sits a more radical spiritual claim: the divine may not be waiting on the other side of your self-improvement project. Maybe grace starts with staying put long enough to tell the truth.
Lionel Blue wrote and spoke as a rabbi who was also an outsider in multiple senses (not least as a gay man in a tradition negotiating modernity). That background matters. The line reads like a defense against coercive narratives: conversion as conquest, change as conformity, personal reinvention as a demand to become palatable. By pairing "change" with "convert", he implies they can be versions of the same pressure - a polite word for submission.
The genius is the compact rhythm: two infinitives, a question mark, then the blunt dismissal. It mimics the internal monologue of someone weary of being told their current self is a problem to be solved. There’s irony, too, because clergy are professionally invested in conversion. Blue’s refusal turns the sermon back on the sermonizer: if religion is only about fixing people, it’s just another ideology with nicer music.
Underneath sits a more radical spiritual claim: the divine may not be waiting on the other side of your self-improvement project. Maybe grace starts with staying put long enough to tell the truth.
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| Topic | Change |
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