Inspiration:
Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be changed into fire?
―From The Desert Fathers
Born Again… and Again… and Again
Abbot Joseph is putting the young monk on notice: the religious life, he’s saying, isn’t finally about rituals and prayers and piety, it’s about transformation of ourselves and our world. It’s about your soul catching on fire and burning bright. It’s about giving your life over to the good. Abbot Joseph is trying to say the same thing that C.S. Lewis said about religion. Religion, he said, isn’t about making people nice. That’s just a byproduct of religion. But religion isn’t about making people nice, it’s about making people new. Not nice people, but new people. Born again…and again…and again.
The Greeks had a word for this kind of transformation. They called it metanoia, which means, “to be given a new heart.” To have someone reach in and grab hold of the old one, pull it out and put in a new heart. Not because the old heart was corrupt. Maybe it was just too tired, or had been broken and patched too many times. Maybe we just needed to trade it in for a larger model. To be given a new heart….
But while we can wish, we can’t will or force the kind of transformation I speak of. We can only prepare ourselves. We can only remove barriers to its fulfillment. If being born again is indeed akin to a new heart, then what we can do is try to make sure that our bodies and our souls won’t reject the transplant. To make sure that our usual defenses are removed. So that when transformation comes, we will know it for what it is, and welcome it.
by Robert Hardies, Senior Minister, All Souls Church, Unitarian, Washington, D.C. TO READ MORE