Repentance: Incomparable Process of Life Change and Spiritual Transformation

This week Mark introduces the Begin A New Life program - a process using the steps of repentance as a means of self examination. He offers personal testimony as to the amazing, deep, and life changing process that is repentance. -Editor

On January 25th, a one-day seminar/workshop was held at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (USA). Twenty-four people—college age and up—were there. The subject was the New Church’s “steps of repentance” as a disciplined spiritual practice¹. The title of the seminar was Begin a New Life: Four Universal Steps of Life Change and Spiritual Transformation.

Begin a New Life is a universal, faith based process of life change and spiritual transformation. It involves a formatting of the steps of repentance into a set of worksheets which allows people to go through the process in journalizing fashion. It also borrows on Swedenborg’s full explanations of the Ten Commandments at two different points in the process—recognition and living a new life.

The purpose of this article is to give a testimony to the value of this process in my own life.

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Feeling the Lord's Love in Repentance

This week Abby takes a fresh look at the concept of repentance in her life—a concept that once made her feel heavy and stuck now genuinely lightens her load. She finds that this welcomed, new perspective on repentance aligns more convincingly with her understanding of God's true nature—one of love and forgiveness. -Editor

By nature I am a person who tends towards negative, victimized ways of looking at my life. It has taken me years to nurture a more empowered and positive outlook. I feel like for the first time in my life I “get it” in a way that I never have before. Up until recently I think that any time I read the Writings or the Bible or really most any religious or spiritual work, I had the victim lens in front of my eyes. I understood the ideas, but they felt hard, depressing, and not particularly helpful in developing the happy, secure life I longed for. They didn’t feel like the evidence of an all loving and supportive God I hoped to have a meaningful relationship with. Everything felt sort of on the edges of application and realization in my life. But in the last 6 months things have changed for me, and I recently had a very uplifting and hopeful experience reading a passage I’ve probably heard many times before.

Being raised in a minister’s family, I have known the major ideas and teachings of the New Church for as long as I can remember. I don’t remember thinking about or hearing the word repentance for the first time, so obviously it’s been an idea that I’ve had in mind for years. I was recently reading the Seven Practices of Peace spiritual growth program produced by General Church Outreach and came across this sequence of quotes over a few pages (40-41). As I was reading them the idea of repentance struck me in a new way.

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Meditate | Blessed

Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments, or better yet, your own article. Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor

When I read Psalms, I often find myself identifying with the psalmist in ways that I wouldn't expect with a sacred text. Psalms that express lamentation of his situation or a wish for revenge on his enemies sound petty and whiny. One way that I come to terms with this is in thinking of it not as a literal prayer, but as an expression of spiritual state. The destruction of my enemies makes more sense if it refers to the evils I struggle with, as opposed to my neighbor.

But in this Psalm, I think there is value in a surface reading. It outlines a process that is humbling, but helps with a lot of frustrating self-talk.

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Meditate | Turning Soil

Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments, or better yet, your own article. Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor

“The church is called the soil [in the Word] because it receives the seeds of faith, or in other words, the true concepts and good urges of faith” (Secrets of Heaven 1068).

“Give ear and hear my voice,
Listen and hear my speech.
Does the plowman keep plowing all day to sow?
Does he keep turning his soil and breaking the clods?
When he has leveled its surface,
Does he not sow the black cummin
And scatter the cummin,
Plant the wheat in rows,
The barley in the appointed place,
And the spelt in its place?
For He instructs him in right judgment,
His God teaches him” (Isaiah 28:23-26).

I happened to read these two passages on the same morning. After reading from Secrets of Heaven, I opened the Word randomly to Isaiah to these verses about soil. I find the image of my spirit as a garden comforting. It is easy to feel brought down by how persistent and ubiquitous my misguided thoughts and subsequent behaviors are. But by translating my spiritual experience to the language of gardens, it becomes nothing to bat an eye at. Of course I’ve got weeds.

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Using the Letter of the Word to Fight in Temptations, Part 1

Malcolm is developing his capacity to use the Word skillfully to fight in temptations. Part one of this essay addresses the power in the letter of the Word, and provides some doctrinal context. Part two? Well you are just going to have to wait! - Editor

Intro

Some time in the last couple of months I read a statement in the teachings of the New Church about spiritual combat and it’s stuck with me. I’ve been chewing on it since then—trying to think through the ramifications and possible applications of it.

Here’s the statement (preceded by a statement from a few numbers before that gives some context).

[T]here are both evil and good spirits with every man; the evil spirits are in his evils, and the good spirits in his goods. When the evil spirits approach they draw forth his evils, while the good spirits, on the contrary, draw forth his goods; whence arise collision and combat, from which the man has interior anxiety, which is temptation...

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And When He Came to Himself

Isaac gives testimony to the inner reaches of his spirit. Laying self satisfaction aside, he witnesses the Lord in battle against the evil within him and vows to remain vigilant until His victory is sure. -Editor.

And when he came to himself ...he said, "How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants." And he arose, and came to his father. (Luke 15:17-20)

The Lord knows I have strayed very far from Him. Hell deceived me through many stages of rebellion to the point where I believed that I was almost fully reformed, and was ready to handle anything with the Word that was in me.

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