Whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.--2nd letter of Paul to followers in Corinth 3:16-18
It seems that God insists on looking at what is good in me, what is God in me, and of course always finds it entirely lovable. God fixes God’s gaze intently where I refuse and fear to look—on my shared, Divine Nature as God’s beloved child (see 1 John 3:2). And one day my gaze beholds God’s gaze (that is what we mean by both conversion & metanoia). At those times I will find God fully lovable and myself fully lovable at the same time. Why? Because it is the same gaze, but they have become one and look out at life together. —Richard rohr
Father Richard Rohr teaches that there are 2 halves of life: in the first, he says, we are tasked with creating a healthy ego structure built on identity, security, and a sense of importance; in the second, we are freed from those very same things. What results is a faith that evolves from something ego-centric into something more intangible that encompasses everything. What we call our faith goes from being a belief system to defend to being an experience to savor; and when that happens [metanoia], we find the divine worth savoring everywhere.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, Mr. Beaver famously replies to Lucy and Susan about meeting Aslan: "Safe?' said Mr Beaver... 'Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He's the King, I tell you".
You’ll have perceived that I was moving toward God in these years without directly encountering God. I once likened my gradual, tedious process of coming to faith to riding on a train. You’re sipping your coffee and all around you people are sitting nearby reading the paper and doing the ordinary things. But then you look out the window and you realize there’s a lot of territory behind you. Gradually over the course of the journey you have left the realm of atheism. At some point you have crossed a border into a new land. Sometimes people hear about my religious journey andask me about my “conversion,” but that word is a relic from the rationalist mentality — as if I traded one belief system for another. The process felt more like an inspiration, as though someone had breathed life into those old biblical stories so that they now appeared true.--David Brooks, NY Times column 12/29/24
As our spiritual journey proceeds in grace, yearning, and willingness, we find our egos and our thinking, imaging, and subconscious minds, along with our bodily senses, more and more free to be vessels of the communing, loving Light shown us in our contemplative hearts, albeit never completely in this life. . . .The flow of this liberating, living Light slowly melts away many of the attachments in us that divide us from our true being in God. In our awareness of forgetful, agitated, and willful times, we become more accepting of the forgiving and encouraging love and image-of-God dignity that is ours as we turn to the gracious Presence. —Tilden Edwards
The word repentance has become known as strong language. It has been used as a bludgeon or a burden on so many for so long that its original richness may be in danger of being lost – if it hasn’t already. The Greek word translated into English as “repentance” ismetanoia. The prefix meta means “change”or “beyond”, hence metaphysics being the study of what is beyond the natural. The word noia means “thought” or “mind”. Together, however, metanoia means to change your thoughts, to change your mind, to turn in a new direction, to reverse a direction and go a different way. [beyond what you previously thought]
Technically, then, this should mean that the Christian faith is a faith that is adapted to change, a faith that is not undone by realizing that its precepts or propositions [might be wrongly understood at times.] It should mean that the joy of repentance is evidenced –over and over and over and over – by those who practice the Christian faith. It should mean that Christianity would be known as the faith that regularly announces that it has, hitherto, been wrong and is neither frightened nor undone by discovering error or misdirection.
Here’s another bit of Greek. The word for “sin” is hamartia, which means “to miss the mark”. So when we discover that we are missing the mark, we reorient our direction. —-Padraig O’Tuama; In the shelter; pg. 199.
So with these words redefined, we might consider how to understand in a new way the beginning of Mark’s gospel: John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. —prh
For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it; and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions. But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me. —Paul describing his metanoia; Gal. 1: 13-16a
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship and daughtership. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely . . . . I have no program for this seeing.[metanoia] It is only given.But the gate of heaven is everywhere. —–Thomas Merton
