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“Repent and believe in the good news!” These are the first
words out of Jesus’ mouth in Mark’s gospel and they are
meant as a summary of the entire gospel. But what do these
words mean?
In English, the word “repent” is often
misunderstood. It seems to imply that we have already done
something wrong, regret it, and now commit ourselves to
live in a new way. Repentance, understood in this way,
means to live beyond a sinful past. Biblically, this is
not quite what is meant. In the gospels, the particular
word used for repentance is metanoia. Literally
this means to do an about face, to turn around, to face in
an entirely new direction. But what direction?
Robert Barron, then a young theologian out of Chicago,
offered a simple, yet profound, understanding this. In his
view, within each of us there are two souls, a little soul
(a pusilla anima) and a great soul (a
magna anima). On any given day we tend to
identify more with one or the other of these and we are a
very different person depending upon which soul is
reigning within us.
Thus, if I take my identity from my little soul I will
inevitably feel bitter and angry. It is here, in the
pusilla anima, where I am petty, afraid, aware of
my hurts, and constantly nursing the sense of having been
cheated and short-changed. In my little soul, I am
paranoid and defensive. When I relate to life through it,
I am short-sighted, impatient, despairing, and constantly
looking for compensation.
 But I also have within me a great soul. When I let it
reign, I become different person altogether. I am relating
out of my great soul at those moments when I am
overwhelmed by compassion, when everyone is brother or
sister to me, when I want to give of myself without
concern of cost, when I am able to carry the tensions of
life without a breakdown in my chastity, when I would
willingly die for others, and when my arms and my heart
would want nothing other than to embrace the whole world
and everyone in it.
All of us, I am sure, have had ample experience of both,
identifying with the great soul and with the petty soul
within us. Sometimes we operate out of one, sometimes out
of the other.
When Jesus asks us to “repent,” to do
metanoia, what he is asking is that we cease identifying
ourselves with the little soul and instead begin to live
out of our other soul, the magna anima. The very etymology
of the word metanoia implies this. It takes its root in
two Greek words: meta – beyond; and
nous – mind. Literally, metanoia means to move
beyond our present mindset, beyond our present way of
seeing things.
When one looks at the miracles of Jesus, it is interesting
to see that so many of them are connected to opening up or
otherwise healing someone’s eyes, ears, or tongue.
These miracles, of course, always have more than a
physical significance. Eyes are opened in order to see
more deeply and spiritually; ears are opened in order to
hear things more compassionately; and tongues are loosened
in order to praise God more freely and to speak words of
reconciliation and love to each other. To put it
metaphorically, what Jesus is doing in these miracles is
attaching the eyes, ears, and tongue to the great soul so
that what a person is now seeing, hearing, and speaking is
not bitterness, hurt, and pettiness but rather compassion,
gratitude, and praise.
Many of us are familiar with a famous passage in Thomas
Merton within which he describes a revelation he had one
day while standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in
Louisville. Among complete strangers in the middle of a
shopping district on a very ordinary day, Merton had the
sense that his eyes, ears, and tongue were suddenly
attached to a bigger soul:
I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I
loved all of those people, that they were mine, and I,
theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even
though we were total strangers. It was like waking from
a dream of separateness … Then it was as if I suddenly
saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of
their hearts, where neither sin, nor desire, nor
self-knowledge, can reach the core of their reality, the
person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only we
could all see each other that way all the time! There
would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty,
no more greed. I suppose that the big problem would be
that we would all fall down and worship each other.
To repent is let the great soul, the image and likeness of
God, reign within us so that, like Merton on the corner of
Fourth and Walnut, we are so overwhelmed with compassion
that indeed we do turn and face in a completely new
direction.
Ron Rolheiser
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