True and False Metanoia

The Greek word for repentance is metanoia. It means to turn around. A useful image.

One time, when I was praying and meditating on this image, it occurred to me (and I attribute this to the Holy Spirit) that there is more than one way to turn around and that not all such turnings are good. I could, for instance, turn around and keep walking backwards in the same direction and I often do.

So as a convert, one of the first challenges I had to confront was my motivation for becoming Catholic. I had received wounds in my former Evangelical non-denom church. Was I becoming Catholic in order to say, “Screw you!” to my former church? Was I turned around in order to keep facing my old church with both middle fingers extended to them and walking backward into the Catholic Church, back to the altar and still primarily engaged with fighting old battles with my former church?

Or was I going to really turn around and walk face forward into the New Life, engage with Christ in the Eucharist and die to my old self with its wounds and bitternesses and unforgiveness?

Was I going to try to build a life on protest or was I going to build a life on him who the Way, the Truth, and the Life? It was one of the earliest and most fundamental choices I realized the Spirit was asking me to make.

I think of that as I look at images like this.

It is not, of course, my place to judge how many trapped in the MAGA Cult are truly turning around and genuinely repenting by walking away from the fundamental selfishness that is the core of this antichrist movement.

Some, it appears, genuinely are contrite for the right reasons and are genuinely turning away from it, not for selfish reasons, but for love of neighbor and/or God.

I hope they all do. But for those described by the meme above, there remains the warning of Paul that there is such a thing as “worldly grief”:

“For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.” (2 Co 7:10)

There is such a thing as a grief that never abandons the fundamental selfishness of the flesh and hands the self over to the love of God and neighbor in union with Christ’s death to self. There is a kind of false metanoia that “turns around” but keeps doggedly walking backward in the same direction you were always going. It will avail you nothing.

I am perfectly convinced that it is not possible to have a real metanoia without the help of grace. I am also perfectly convinced that God is profligate about giving such grace on the flimsiest of provocations. (The prodigal son, recall, repented not because he had some massive sense of regret for insulting his Father, but because he realized he could get something to eat from Dad and, which is key, he made the fundamental realization that he was a fool who needed help. God is pleased with even this, the flimsiest opening to grace.)

But then we really do have to receive the grace and grow toward the next offering of grace which will ask of us another death to self and opening to God. If we insist on just enough grace so we can go on being fundamentally selfish, we can expect failure and death by starvation of soul. If we open even a little to God’s love in truth and sincerity of heart, he will not hesitate to enter.