We are halfway through the season of Lent and I am wondering how everybody’s Lent is going? My hope this season was to make every effort to be “more present” and to get my head out of my phone, particularly on the streets and in elevators. And I confess to you that I have failed to be consistent – sometimes out of forgetfulness and sometimes because there is just that one last email…
Perhaps my Lenten intention does not rise to the level of repentance, but in a promise to God and self, I wonder about the guardrails we create for our intentions. The word “repent” is one, at least for me, that conjures images of punishment and apology. However, the Greek word is “metanoia” meaning "changing one's mind”. In Ancient Greece, this term originally meant “a transformative change of heart as in a spiritual conversion”. Perhaps we realize what we must leave behind in order to create something better for ourselves and for those whom we love. There is an “in-breaking” to this kind of realization. But this is hard, (maybe that is where the Lent part comes in!).
We read all the time about unhappiness and anxiety, big tech pulling our attention in a hundred directions at once. A 24-hour news cycle makes us aware of the inequalities and suffering in the world and industries pray upon our most vulnerable insecurities telling us all the time how we are not measuring up. We are glued to our phones and to hyper connectivity that has left us all exhausted and anxious. Dr. Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, writes that tech has taken the transcendent out of our lives and that in our fragmented online world we are losing our ability to encounter one another, bodily, soulfully. He writes, “What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul—some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God.” He continues. “We need to see what is fresh, unique, never fully known, never finally certain, but full of potential: humor, poetry, art, narrative, music, the sacred, indeed everything we love; [we must] understand that nothing is ever static and unchanging, that everything is flowing and interconnected”. *
This sounds like an antidote to despair and a wonderful way to imagine Jesus’ charge to metanoia – a transformative way of thinking and being in the world and a transformative way to thinking about Lent. While I have not been as disciplined as I had intended, I have made it a practice to be off of my phone in elevators and while walking. I find myself curious for eye contact in an elevator ride where connection is almost universally avoided. When conversation does spark, I have noticed that my body relaxes a bit and I exhale into a random joining with a stranger, if only in a shared smile.
Bless you all as we mark this “mid-way” through Lent. May the rest of your Lenten journey offer you a chance for your own “metanoia”.
*https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/03/resist-the-machine-apocalypse.
