Hi, everyone. This is Opera Chavez from Faith Matters. Today we're doing something a little different and sharing a really fascinating conversation between Thomas Maconkey and Adam Miller, a popular author and professor of philosophy.

It's taken from Thomas' online course, Transformations of Faith.

As part of the course, Thomas and Adam recorded a series of conversations that take a deeper dive on several of the ideas and principles that Thomas teaches in the course, and each of the conversations is really enlightening in its own way.

In this particular conversation, Thomas and Adam explore the idea of repentance and forgiveness in the context of spiritual growth and transformation, and so really different take than you might expect in a typical gospel doctrine discussion.

We hope it provides a unique perspective on this subject that we spend quite a bit of time thinking about and talking about as Latter Day Saints, and of course to hear all of the conversations or to learn more about this course, you can head to transformationsoffaith.org to sign up. Thanks as always for listening, and we hope that you enjoy this conversation.

Alright, this is our fourth conversation. Thomas directed at session three of your transformations of faith course.

We're going to connect the content of this session to the more familiar Latter Day Saint topic of repentance.

What do you make of the word repentance? What does repentance mean?

So building off of all of the beautiful inside wisdom and revelation from our tradition, from a contemplative perspective, I mentioned this in the course itself.

I don't think it's always helpful to go back to the original language and the etymology of the original language, but in this case, I think it bears some fruit.

Metanoia in the Greek, and this can be interpreted different ways, but it goes well with our earlier conversations on the course in that one legitimate interpretation of metanoia is going beyond the small self.

Metanoia is kind of a going beyond, noia is literally mind. So if we're repenting, we are going beyond our normal assumptions, our sometimes calcified and unhelpful beliefs that actually end up keeping us distant from God.

We go beyond into a space of kind of free fall or open vulnerability to God.

In Thomas Keating's words, when we repent, when we engage in metanoia, we're looking for happiness in a whole new place, rather than manipulating the conditions of our lives, trying to get the temperature just right, trying to get the numbers in my bank account, just right, trying to get my kids to be just the right amount of compliant.

At the end, we move to a greater sense of self where the love, compassion, forgiveness, virtue is beyond conditions. It's who we are already, and we pour ourselves in the condition that is maybe the more contemplative approach to repentance.

And it's not unrelated at all to maybe more common versions of repentance that we talk about.

And a more common version of repentance would be something like, I've done something specific wrong. And now as a result, I have to go through this kind of punitive process that we describe as repentance and until I manage to get God to forgive me as a result of the thing that I did.

Clearly, though in the end, that would have to actually involve going beyond who and what I am. If I were to ever actually do that kind of smaller, narrower version of repentance, I would only ever actually succeed at it if I engaged in that much larger, more difficult project of this more fundamental transformation of who I am.

Right. If we just obey the rules, we could start to idolatize the rules themselves. We could do the right things but never change in our heart.

And the continuum for me of, let's say, our more common definition of repentance and the more meta definition of repentance, metanoia is that in the common practice of repentance, what defines a sinful act or how do we know and we've done something wrong?

From my perspective, it's been a lot of human wisdom and practice over the centuries of noticing like, hey, when you lie to somebody, you're actually trying to manipulate conditions in a way that aggrandizes the natural man and actually diminishes your spiritual being.

Right. So the boundaries themselves of why do we repent when we repent? Well, they're actually from my point of view, very skillful markers that tell us like in operation, when you're like trying to fish out that wishbone and like, you know, you get the metal side and it beeps, the commandments are a little bit like, oh, you just lied to somebody, you just stole something, you just wished harm on somebody.

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