Metanoia

“Lord, give me back my sight! Bartimaeus

According to the Gospel of Mark, the very first words spoken by Jesus as he began his public ministry in Galilee were, “Repent and believe the good news.” Familiar words, perhaps, but here, as elsewhere, familiarity tends to blunt the impact. This is particularly true of the first word, “repent” which, over the centuries, we have tended to domesticate. Nowadays it means saying sorry for something we've done wrong, expressing regret for past actions, especially when those actions have been discovered and exposed. So, politicians and other public figures who fall from grace will tell us how much they regret their misdemeanours, but we are often left wondering whether there would have been any remorse at all if they hadn't been caught out.

Those of us who were raised in a Catholic environment will no doubt associate the word “repentance” with the sacrament of confession, in which we were encouraged to present to the priest a list of our sins with some idea of their frequency, and to express regret for them as a condition of absolution. From our earliest days we were trained to examine our conscience in order to identify those actions, which by commission or omission, had transgressed divine or human laws. This is not a bad practice, and some such conscientious self-scrutiny should have a place in the life of all who consider themselves to be on the spiritual quest, but whether we should recite our litany of sins to a priest is another matter. Pity the poor priest! For all that we think ourselves unique, human sins have a very narrow range and we are all, for the most part, boringly predictable. A priest friend of mine who had been ordered by the parish priest to hear the confessions of every child in the junior school was almost demented mid-way through the second day: “If I hear one more child say that he's said 'bum' four times and thrown mud at the buses I'll go insane,” he said. Adult sins are hardly more colourful.

One of the problems with confession - especially in the way that it used to be practised, it's more like therapy nowadays - was that it tended to foster within us a strange attitude towards our sins. Although we had to promise to try not to commit these sins again, we knew that we would, so we hoped against hope that the call to our eternal reward would come as close to our last confession as possible, preferably while we were walking down the church steps. This came to be known as the “elevator theory” on the mistaken assumption that if a lift is hurtling to the ground you should jump up and down in the hope that when it finally hits the bottom you are up in the air!

Please don't get the wrong impression. I in no sense want to attack or belittle the Catholic practice of confession. People say that Catholicism teaches you how to feel guilty (what's wrong with that?) but it also has a method whereby that guilt can be assuaged, and I take very seriously Carl Jung's telling observation that in his psychiatric work he never had to deal with a practising Catholic. Jung himself believed that the sacrament of confession - or “reconciliation” as it is now called - contributed in some way to the psychological health of those Catholics who had a mature approach to it.

However, all this is a long way from what the Gospels mean by repentance. The word that is generally translated by “repentance” is the Greek word “metanoia”, which does not just mean expressing regret for past actions: it means “completely changing your mind”. Jesus was not calling upon people to make a list of their misdemeanours; he was calling for a radical reappraisal of the whole content and meaning of their lives. What he was really saying to them was something like this: “What does your culture tell you is the meaning of your life? Think again. What does your culture tell you is the way to happiness and personal fulfilment? Think again. What does your culture tell you is the way to achieve genuine community? Think again.”

Think again. Look at things again. There is a good case to be made that the word “religion” itself means just this. We are usually told that “religion” comes from a Latin root meaning “to bind or restrain”, so religion is the means by which our passions are held back and the wilder and more wilful aspects of our nature are kept in check. This is what people call for when they say that the world needs more religion in order to stem the tide of lawless behaviour. In yesterday's Irish Times Magazine, Dianne Krishnan (in a very interesting article, by the way, about being raised as a Hindu and a Catholic) says: “Regardless of the source of one's beliefs, it should always be borne in mind that religion is a means of controlling, guiding, and curtailing behaviour - a collective superego designed to be the barometer by which we measure our actions.” Dianne Krishnan is following in the footsteps of such notable Christian thinkers as St. Augustine and Lactantius who held precisely this opinion as to the meaning of the word “religion”.

But the Roman orator Cicero, who was writing some decades before the birth of Jesus, gives a different derivation of the word. It comes, he said, from the word “legere”, to read, and re-legere means to re-read, to look at things again. Notice that on this understanding religion is not something that gives us any new information about the world; it is not the source of metaphysical principles for us to give our assent to. It is simply an invitation to change our perspective on the things we already experience and know. It's a bit like those pictures that psychologists use which can be seen in two ways: look at it one way and it's an old woman with a crooked nose; look at it another way and it's a flower growing in a pot. The same lines, the same shades, but a completely different image depending entirely on the perception of the viewer. And it's sometimes possible to vary the image at will, to make and then change the picture for yourself.

I had a quite dramatic real-life experience of this change of perception a few months ago. Morag and I were sitting in a pub in my home town of Pontefract in Yorkshire. It was early evening, so the place was quite empty, but out of the corner of my eye I could see an elderly man eating a meal. A few minutes later he came up to our table on his way out. “It's Bill Darlison, isn't it?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied. He must have seen the perplexity on my face, because he said, “You don't remember me, do you?” I had to admit that I didn't. “I'm Kenny Nelson,” he said.

Now Kenny Nelson was almost my exact contemporary, brought up on the same housing estate as myself, and although we were never friends, I had seen him almost every day of my young life. Here he was, some decades on, an elderly man, but since I didn't perceive myself as old, I couldn't see him as old, and his whole aspect changed immediately. I didn't will it; it just happened. The years rolled off him as I looked at him in a most bizarre way, and the man I watched walking out of the pub was not the same man I had originally seen sitting in the corner, even though not a single feature of his had changed intrinsically. Just the mention of his name had automatically and genuinely transformed my perception of him. The text I was presented with had not changed, but my reading of it certainly had.
In an analogous way, religion, when it is wholesome, productive and beneficial, operates not on our knowledge, but on our perceptions. When it tries to do more than this, when it busies itself with metaphysics, trying to prove the unproveable, filling the heads of its adherents with poppycock, it becomes dangerous and divisive. Unitarianism is one of the few religious movements, which attempts to avoid these dangers by relegating speculation on metaphysics to a pretty lowly place, and this is the reason why, in the minds of some people, Unitarianism is not a religion at all. “A Unitarian,” writes Somerset Maugham in Of Human Bondage, “very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and has a very lively and sustaining faith in he doesn't quite know what.” A similar accusation was made in a recent episode of The Simpsons. (I think one of the writers must be a Unitarian because there have been a number of these playful jibes.) In this particular episode, little Lisa goes to an ice-cream stall at the church fete. Above the stall is a banner declaring “A Sundae Service You Can Swallow”, and all the ice-creams on offer have religious names: such things as Buddhist Banana Split or Virgin Mary Knickerbocker Glory. “You can even have a Unitarian ice-cream,” says the Rev. Lovejoy. “Oh, I'll have one of those,” says Lisa. When presented with the bowl, she exclaims, “But there's nothing in it!” “Exactly,” says Rev. Lovejoy.

This empty bowl is our uniqueness and our strength. We don't attempt to influence what people believe; we just try to influence the way they see, and our services are opportunities for us to point out to each other some of the things we may have missed along the way. Because, of course, we all miss things and we often look at the wrong things. We fail to perceive the obvious, we miss the sublime as we concentrate on the banal and the trivial. We are unaware that we are entertaining angels because we are too busy wondering whether L'Oreal really have found a way to give our eyelashes both volume and separation. (Oh, the wonders of modern science!) Rabbi Sydney Greenberg, in his book Say Yes to Life, tells us that when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, more people went to gaze at the empty space on the wall in the two years it was missing than visited the actual painting in the previous twelve years that it had hung there unmolested!

A modern parable of the human condition. “You look and look but you cannot see; you listen and listen by you cannot hear,” says the prophet Isaiah. You want to see the glory of God? Then stop looking for your own glory. You want to listen to the hymn of the universe? Then stop straining to hear the coins dropping.* “Repent,” says Jesus, “Metanoiete, change the way you think about things.” “Re-read the book of the world, and re-read the book of yourself,” says Cicero; the text of both is mind-blowing to those who have eyes to see.

Bill Darlison
14th October 2001

*A reference to the children's story in which people could not hear the sound of a cricket, but were all aware of coins falling on the pavement.