Repentance

Gospel reading: Luke 18.1-8a
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

This entry on repentance probably should begin with some of my own. I didn't blog last week. But maybe you know that the word translated 'repentance' in the New Testament is metanoia which means to turn around. It's not really about saying you're sorry.

I guess the poem, "The Monster Who Was Sorry" was a kind of turning.

It was written by a boy whom Kathleen Norris had taught. He started it by saying how much he hated it when his dad yelled at him. Then the poem progressed violently as he pushed his sister down the stairs, wrecked his room, and eventually destroyed the whole town. But it concluded, "Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, 'I shouldn't have done all that.'"

Norris insisted that the boy had written a pretty good cursing psalm. You've probably read them before. In them the psalmist imagines all kinds of misfortune for his enemy, sometimes in gruesome detail. We rarely think of such psalms as part of a process of repentance. But Norris's pupil shows us how this can be.

It seems helpful to think of the anger in the poem as something that needs a change in direction, a metanoia. The boy ended up turning his father's anger around, or halting it. The imagined destruction was from a continuation of the destructive force. What new anger might his have ignited? Remember the cheesy old campfire song, "It only takes a spark"? It's just as true of anger as of love.

The insight the boy's poem opened up for me is that repentance is a kind of imagination. How do we take the anger, or violence or hatred we've been given and turn it around? Because it does take up residence in us. It becomes our own anger, and we end up being the only ones who can repent.

Healing was possible because the boy was willing to express just what kind of anger was alive in himself. It would push sisters down staircases, and wreck towns and only by realizing the destruction it would wreak was the boy able to turn that anger around. "Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, 'I shouldn't have done all that.'" He let his imagination loose just enough to realize the damage the anger he received from his father would do if he just passed it along unchecked. He imagined honestly enough to turn his anger around. This is true repentance.

A cycle was broken when the boy was honest enough to describe his anger, but strong enough or humble enough to keep from passing it on. His imagination was redemptive, because his imagination was a form of repentance. His imagination provided the space in which he might turn.

Repentence doesn't seem so grim an obligation when we realize that it's less about satisfying an indignant God than imagining a way out of a destructive cycle of anger or guilt or any other sin. It's about imagining life in the messy house we're about to make and turning in a different direction.