Metanoia
“What
gets translated in Scripture from the Greek 'metanoia' as 'repent'
means 'to go beyond the mind we have.'”
Gregory
Boyle (Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, p.2)
Too often I fall into the
category of fatalist—I tell myself the situation is stuck in a
construct that I have no power to change. What follows is this muted
thought: I am therefore off the hook to do anything about it. If I
can claim powerlessness, then I can blame someone else, or whatever
powers that be for the mess. After that, I can feel righteous
indignation. Clearly, I need to repent!
There are easy answers to
any dilemma. Most of them either don't work, are short-term fixes, or
are so brutal that they cause an even greater problem. If we have a
modicum of power in a given situation, then we can come down hard and
chop off the offending person or condition. We can “power over”,
which is what we humans have been doing since we were
hunter-gatherers. Whoever has the most power, usually in the form of
weapons, wins the contest. What that has brought us is near
continuous warfare; whole generations lost in battle.
There are hard answers to
any dilemma. We can begin by accepting our own role in bringing about
the “conditions on the ground.” What have we as a person, or we
as a nation, done to co-create the mess in which we find ourselves?
Repenting in such a situation would mean declaring that we will not
provoke, nor react to provocation by another. In our personal lives,
we will negotiate; we will stay in the conversation and try to the
best of our ability to see through the eyes of the other—we will,
in other words, empathize with them. As a nation it would mean not
antagonizing others to the point of going to war—it would mean that
we refuse war as an option. We haven't done that yet, but I have hope
that someday we will.
Going beyond the mind we
have requires us to get past our own ego; to get past our own need to
feel privileged and important. We would begin to see the world with
new eyes—ones that do not measure a person's value by the color of
his skin, the size of his bank account, or where on the earth he or
she was born. And we would value ourselves enough to courageously
stand with those who cannot stand for themselves. Repenting is not
just changing our words, it is changing our lives to reflect a
different way of being. All of us, myself included, are works in progress; we are like
half-formed clay sculptures. Someday, if we work at it, the fullness
of our humanity will be revealed.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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