Repent!

I have posted a new essay on my website called Repent!

This essay is particularly relevant to the Eco-Spiritual Revolution  retreat day  my father and I are planning for April 22. Other essays that are relevant to that day include Metanoia and In Wildness is Our Salvation.

I am convinced that most of the work we are doing to alter the destructive trajectory of human civilization is tinkering at the margins. We are extremely resistant to making change in the only place it really matters: our own lives. A fundamental change of direction is needed, which Jesus probably called shub, which was translated into Greek as metanoia and into English as repentance. Shub means “to vomit” as well as “to turn or return.” I take it to mean being so repulsed by the status quo in oneself, in one’s own life, that one needs to be viscerally emptied in order to move in a new direction.

Here is an excerpt from Repent!:

“In some fundamental way, human society is profoundly out of touch with reality. “Be not reconciled to this world,” said Jesus. Repent! Turn away from your society and everything it stands for, and turn toward God and everything God stands for. Or as John Dominic Crossan put it so clearly in his Birth of Christianity, turn away from “all that systematically destroys and dehumanizes and dominates.” Turn toward all that creates and includes and makes whole.

“The essential question of my life from that point until the present became, what is the kingdom of God? Where is it to be found? What does it mean to repent, to turn away from all that is unreal, and turn toward God, toward wholeness, toward reality? I knew then what my purpose was: to find the kingdom of God, not in some future time or distant place, but here and now. I felt that it was “right at hand.” I think I knew intuitively that that meant it was already present, but unnoticed, unappreciated, perhaps not fully realized, veiled by the destructive illusions spun by the human mind. I was determined to see through the illusions and break through to the kingdom, which lay, I was convinced, right at our fingertips.”

Read the whole essay…