Can we change everything?  A famous line from Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's novel The Leopard opines that, "everything needs to change, so everything will stay the same."
     At first glance, this statement seems one of contradiction.  If we change everything, how can anything be the same?  On the other hand, if we change everything, then, well, everything will, in the big picture, remain exactly the same.  If we wish for change, then, we must change what matters most while preserving what is less important--or what must always remain.
     Except for one thing:  spiritual conversion.  As William James observed in his famous study of conversion, Varieties of Religious Experience, people who undergo a spiritual conversion do indeed feel as if everything in them has changed, totally and unalterably.  If spiritual conversion is not total, if it does not change everything in a person, then, yes, everything will remain the same.
     If spiritual conversion is supernatural, this makes perfect sense.  If we try to change ourselves, by ourselves, we will indeed always be the same.  Nothing fundamental in us has really changed.  However, if God changes us, the entire picture shifts.  Yes, we will still be ourselves, but everything that is foundational and seminal in us has changed, engendered by transcendent exchange.
     Put another way, how can we change everything if we will always be temporal and material beings?  Only if we become beings shaped by another realm and presence, another plane of being, can we ever hope to be radically new.
     It takes what we are not to make us what we should really be.