Miraculous Metanoia (August)

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I cannot assume we grew up with the same teaching and therefore childhood understanding of repentance. I am actually pretty certain that the teaching I heard, and my childhood understanding I walked away with do not match. A psychologist friend recently pointed out the many perspectives in any conversation: What you mean and what I mean; What I think you mean, and what you think I mean; What you think I think you meanRepentance is a powerful word, and has been used and misused in many ways. I love words, and so when a word triggers a reaction in me or I notice that it does in others, I like to dig in, and see what I can find. 

From my childhood and young adulthood connotations, my honest and initial response to the word repentance, and hearing a call to repent is that I must have done something wrong. I've been a bad boy, and I need to be a good boy to appease an angry God. I have images of street corner preachers holding signs listing a litany of sins they recognize in others (but probably none of their own.) That holier-than-though attitude has little to do with the original intent of when biblical writers used the word repentance word. Certainly the pre-repentant life is likely destructive to the self and others, but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

I remember in my church each Lent (the time I'm writing this) a focus on repentance as a practice of preparing for Christ's passion and resurrection. The Greek word we translate repentance is metanoia. Meta-is about change, and noia is about our mind or thinking. So to experience metanoia, or repentance, is to change our minds and thinking. It is about transforming the way we view the world. Learning about the repentance word was a metanoia for me. It freed me from the worry of being a bad boy, and taught me to practice an openness to transformation from God. I sought, and seek to see the world as God sees it. It can be a frightening thing to recognize that the way we see the world may need to change. If we believe those calls to repentance, that is our task. To repent is to admit that I do not see the world as God sees it, and I invite the Holy Spirit to work in, through, and around me to bring about my own transformation. 

Now, I believe repentance is a life-long process, and a series of small changes. I appreciate the call from John the Baptist in the season of Advent (pre-Christmas) and the repeated reminder through the season of Lent to repent. Be transformed. St. Paul writes it plainly, when he urges the Christians in Rome not to "conform to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of your mind." God created us for this work: to become the amazing human being God created each of us to be. A big part of that becoming is allowing and participating in the work of the Holy Spirit in us. Repentance is less about not being bad as it is about being who we were born to become, and who we were born to become is good. So, repent of those images of angry street preachers and their sandwich-board lists of their own obsessions. Open your heart to the mind-renewing transformation which the Holy Spirit is already working on, urging you to become who God created you to become. 

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