Today we’re doing something a little different, and sharing a really fascinating conversation between Thomas McConkie and Adam Miller, a popular author and professor of philosophy. It’s taken from Thomas’s online course, Transformations of Faith.
As a part of the course, Thomas and Adam recorded a series of conversations that take a deeper dive on several of the ideas and principles 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 it’s a very different take than you might expect in a typical “gospel doctrine class” 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 the course, you can head to transformationsoffaith.org to sign up.
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Full Episode Transcript
Adam Miller:
All right. This is our fourth conversation, Thomas, directed at Session Three of your Transformations of Faith course, and we wanted to connect the-
Thomas McConkie:
I’m happy you wore the same shirt, yeah. [inaudible 00:00:36]. I’m just saying that I appreciate that.
Adam Miller:
I try to keep it consistent. I’ve noticed-
Thomas McConkie:
Keep it dry-cleaned and pressed. I’m impressed. Four weeks into this.
Adam Miller:
That’s right. I’ve always noticed that … Do you watch The Great British Bake Off? Have you ever seen that show?
Thomas McConkie:
Clips of it.
Adam Miller:
It’s a fantastic show, especially in a contemplative vein. I think you would really like it. But the competition happens over two days every weekend, and people wear the same clothes both days.
Thomas McConkie:
That’s awesome.
Adam Miller:
So, it feels like-
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah.
Adam Miller:
There we are.
Thomas McConkie:
Love it.
Adam Miller:
You guys can keep that or not as part of the-
Thomas McConkie:
It’s gold. Print it.
Adam Miller:
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?
Thomas McConkie:
Building off of all of the beautiful insight, wisdom, and revelation from our tradition, from a contemplative perspective … I mention 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.
Thomas McConkie:
Metanoia, in the Greek … 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.” Meta is a kind of going beyond; noia is literally “mind.”
Thomas McConkie:
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.
Thomas McConkie:
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, we repent when we move to a greater sense of self where the love, compassion, forgiveness, virtue, is beyond conditions.
Thomas McConkie:
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.
Adam Miller:
Yeah. 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, until I manage to get God to forgive me, as a result of the thing that I did.
Adam Miller:
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 and 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.
Thomas McConkie:
Right. If we just obey the rules, we could start to idolatrize the rules themselves. We could do the right things, but never change in our heart. 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 when we’ve done something wrong?
Thomas McConkie:
Well, 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?
Thomas McConkie:
So, the boundaries themselves of, why do we repent when we repent? They’re actually, from my point of view, very skillful markers that tell us, like in Operation when you’re trying to fish out that wishbone and you hit 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.”
Thomas McConkie:
That is a telltale sign that you are in the territory of the natural fallen man, and that you’re trying to manipulate things to your own end and your own glory. So, they’re the same thing in the end. This is a different way of thinking about it that I think can be helpful to deepen our insight and our practice.
Adam Miller:
In my experience, there’s a kind of counterintuitive aspect to the way that repentance actually unfolds meaningfully, too; with respect to the way that if I’m bent on getting myself to be a certain kind of way, or be a certain kind of thing, or present to God a certain kind of perfection. If I’m bent as a result, then, of rejecting a lot of who or what I am, that this in the end doesn’t actually lead to the kind of transformation that would make me more acceptable to God, or would connect me to God more deeply.
Thomas McConkie:
Say more about that. In other words, what is the kind of person you would present to God, in your experience, that leads to that experience?
Adam Miller:
Well, it’s tempting to think about repentance, I think, as a kind of surgical process in which I progressively excise from myself all the parts of me that are offensive. And that I’m successful at repenting, then, to the degree that I’ve excised those bits that I find offensive, and that I assume that God finds offensive.
Adam Miller:
But that in the end, changing my relationship to those parts in a way that saves them, or redeems them, doesn’t involve getting rid of them. It involves instead learning how to adopt the kind of compassionate demeanor and forgiveness that God Himself is exemplifying for me, in relationship to me.
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah, yeah. One thing I hear, a subtlety in what you’re saying. There’s always this clear and present danger in spiritual life to … We want the goods. We want the big transformation. We want atonement, we want forgiveness, but please leave all of me intact as you do it. Please mind my ego boundaries, mind my insecurities. Please don’t tamper with the things that are too painful to touch.
Thomas McConkie:
I hear you saying, if we’re really going to undergo the process, there’s a self-sacrifice involved. We’re becoming a new creature. Not perfecting the sinful self, but burying the sinful self. Or something like that going on in what I hear you saying.
Adam Miller:
Yeah. On the one hand, there’s the sentiment exemplified by St. Augustine’s famous prayer: “Lord, make me continent, but not yet. Lord, free me from my lustful desires, but not yet.” Right? There’s that desire to be saved without undergoing the transformation.
Adam Miller:
But on the flip side, there’s also that very dangerous desire to want to be done with all of what I am all together. To be done with all that, to be free from it, to be free from all of the little finite, annoying imperfections that constantly crop up and displease me about myself. And to want God to strip me of all of them, instead of my wanting Him to leave those alone.
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of our conversation recently about atonement. When we’re repenting, we’re actually atoning with our humanity and acknowledging that there is a limited, finite aspect to ourselves that we don’t have the wherewithal to lift up and redeem ourselves. I’m not sure if you are hearing that connection as well, but it feels present for me when we talk about this aspect of repentance.
Adam Miller:
Yes. Yes. Session Three has a lot to do with the heart.
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah.
Adam Miller:
Is repentance something like the daily, ongoing work of restoring feeling to the heart?
Thomas McConkie:
One thing as a practical matter that I’ve found over the years of really intentionally cultivating heart awareness, is that when I’m up in my head and I’m kind of staring vigilantly out at the world distrustfully, I’m turning thoughts over thinking about it, trying to know the world and understand it, it really enhances my sense of separation and alienation from the world.
Thomas McConkie:
When I’m really resting in the heart at the level of awareness and I’m knowing self, world, and other through the heart, a whole different kind of world presents itself to me. It’s one with much softer boundaries, if there are any boundaries at all, in a given moment.
Thomas McConkie:
Therefore I would say that, yes, absolutely, to learn to live in the heart and from the heart is a powerful path that I think is especially potent in its own way in the Christian tradition. As Christ is exemplified, you know, the sacred heart. It helps us go beyond the small self.
Thomas McConkie:
I don’t know if we can really progress in our practice of repentance at a certain point, and not give up these very rigid boundaries of: There’s me, there’s you, there’s the world, this person is friendly, this person’s not friendly. To me, a deeply heart-based practice takes us in the direction of loving our neighbor as our very own being. So, they all feel interrelated in my heart at the moment.
Adam Miller:
This is repentance is something like a positive way of life, rather than an occasionally negative thing that I have to do in response to my own failures. This is repentance as a kind of a proactive, positive cultivation of this open heart, that allows me to continually go beyond the limits of my own mind and my own soul.
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah. It feels like you really know that there … If I have an association with what repentance is from my cultural upbringing, it’s that repentance is like, “Oh, no. I’ve got to go in to see the Bishop, because I did something grave enough that would necessitate that visit.” Not always, but as a caricature it’s something like that.
Thomas McConkie:
The way you just framed it, it’s something like: I’m repenting in this moment, because of course just a moment ago I identified with my small self again and I felt separate from others, and I failed to be as loving as I could. I felt separate from God.
Thomas McConkie:
I take a breath, I relax, I drop into my heart, and I realize that the same love in my heart is God’s love that sheds itself abroad in the hearts of all mankind. And boom. I’m back in the game. I just repented, but in a very … It’s a repentance positive practice, we could say, and I feel joy to hear you christen that, Adam.
Adam Miller:
I suspect that discovering what a Christian life looks like depends a lot on discovering the fact that repentance is a practice of joy. That this is something that you want to take up all day long, every day, as a way of engaging the world, rather than something that you want to avoid at all costs as a last resort, in light of your own imperfection.
Thomas McConkie:
Yes, yes, yes. Because when we do relate to repentance as like a last line of defense, it kind of reifies. It solidifies that worldview that as long as I act in a certain way and stay within these boundaries, I’m good. It’s related to another conversation we had about magical thinking, in that if there’s a danger about anything on the spiritual path, it’s the danger of getting fixed, and getting stuck, and supposing that we’ve arrived.
Thomas McConkie:
I hear you expressing in quite a new way, at least to my ears, that repentance is another way we fixate. We define that process as this thing, and I hear you kind of opening up an invitation to just live in repentance all the time. That feels very good to me.
Adam Miller:
Yeah. In this same vein, I always wonder if it wouldn’t do us a lot of good to, instead of talking about Jesus as the person who never had to repent, if we talked about Jesus as the person who was more spectacularly and perfectly successful at continually repenting than any of us.
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah. Wow. Yeah. The man who only repented.
Adam Miller:
He only repented.
Thomas McConkie:
He was so good at it, that’s all he ever did.
Adam Miller:
That’s his only thing that he does. He only preaches repentance. He only does repentance.
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah. That is the gospel. That is good news if I’ve heard it.
Adam Miller:
Yeah. Now, hopefully, people won’t misunderstand what we meant by that and take it as blasphemous, but-
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah, indeed.
Adam Miller:
You described the ego’s stories and labels as a kind of straitjacket in which we get stuck. It’s the very straitjacket that we have to … the small self that we have to go beyond in order to reconnect, and be at one with ourselves and the world around us. But those stories and labels are in lots of ways a straitjacket that we put on ourselves. We cinch ourselves up inside those straitjackets. Why do you think we do that?
Thomas McConkie:
Yeah. This question comes up a lot in transformative practice, whether we’re talking in the context of Christianity, or just our humanity. Let me see if I can make a few orienting comments about it.
Thomas McConkie:
As I look at it, as we develop as human beings, it’s very functional to learn to make distinctions. One of the first distinctions we make as a human being, around the age of 18 months old, we learn to put up a boundary and say “no.” As we’re just starting to form a sense of a unique, beautiful self, a child of God, we realize we have agency. We have autonomy. We can say “yes” to some things, and “no” to others.
Thomas McConkie:
From there the linguistic world, the intellectual world, only becomes more complex. We go from “no,” to having rarefied conversations about what atonement means. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all good news. Distinctions used provisionally can be empowering. By distinctions, I mean ideas, thoughts, language. We use language to say, “It’s this, not that.”
Thomas McConkie:
Language tells us, points to us what we’re talking about and what we’re not talking about, and if that’s all we ever have it can become a prison. We want the self to not be a prison, but a home to come home to. If I don’t have the option of leaving my hardened ideas, my prejudices, my assumptions, I think we could legitimately describe that as a kind of hell realm.
Thomas McConkie:
But if I realize that these distinctions are here when I need them … Like, I’m trying to make distinctions right now, to respond to a question in the hopes that the distinctions lead us to a place beyond distinctions. On a good day, when I do my job and I know right when to shut up, the distinctions take us into a place that’s one of, we could say, pure faith. I don’t need to name it. I don’t even need to understand it. I just know it.
Thomas McConkie:
And so, my sense is that we’ll develop into healthy distinctions, and hopefully learn how to let go of distinctions when appropriate and be able to do both: distinctions and no distinctions. Mind, heart. Hold those both in a deeper embrace.
Adam Miller:
Yeah. It’s easy to get locked inside of a cell of our own making. It’s easy to end up locked inside of a cell holding the key and not being able to get out, because in some ways we’ve locked ourselves inside those prison cells. There’s something comforting and protective about our own captivity that we hang onto, that we cling to, that’s also really risky and dangerous.
Thomas McConkie:
Right. Yes. I was watching Better Call Saul last night with my wife.
Adam Miller:
What a great show. What a great show.
Thomas McConkie:
You watch it? I love it.
Adam Miller:
Oh, it’s fantastic.
Thomas McConkie:
Oh, it’s … the drama, the pacing. I noticed … This was a particularly tense episode, and it was like one of the hundreds of times a day I catch myself. Where the music was just crescendoing, and one of the cartel members had a gun, and one of your favorite people might die, and everything in my body was just like, “What’s going to happen?”
Thomas McConkie:
As I got to the point of tension, I realized like, “Oh, I’m so tense I can just [pheeewww 00:20:53], and just relax.” And when I relax, when I drop back into my heart, it’s like the fascination with the drama just totally flatlines, and all is well. And all shall be well.
Thomas McConkie:
Then five seconds later I’m like, “No, but the music is so [inaudible 00:21:07],” and that’s an example for me of my own straitjacket. Like, I notice a thousand times a day where I’m much more comfortable tightening up, being in my head, and being defended against just the free flow of God. We all have straitjackets, and I thought it might be good radio if I volunteered my own straitjacket as an example.
Adam Miller:
That was a great example. To bring us back around, then, this is … I mean, repentance in lots of ways hinges on my willingness to unlock my own cell and step outside of it. It depends on my willingness to not just stay safe in there, even though that safety is itself an illusion.
Thomas McConkie:
Absolutely. I want to add, again, I really have had the privilege of working with a lot of students over the last 10 years, many of them Latter Day Saints because of the work I do in this community. What I’ve noticed when people drop into deep states of concentration, when people are deep in contemplation, a very common report is that there’s a kind of threshold, where right as the sense of self … In other words, like the set of ideas, and experiences, and likes, and dislikes that have kind of solidified into, “This is who I am.”
Thomas McConkie:
When that starts to relax and we start to get bigger, one of the most common experiences I hear reported back to me is one of total fear, even terror. I think it’s really important to just hold that in our conversation. That is, you and I are talking about the straitjacket, and opening up, and metanoia, going beyond the small self.
Thomas McConkie:
There’s a reason we stay in the cell. Just at the level of the body, there’s something in our body that says it’s not okay to be that open. It’s not okay to trust the world, and trust God so fully that I totally let my guard down. We have physiological programming and experience that says, “Don’t let your guard all the way down. Don’t give God both eyes.”
Thomas McConkie:
And it’s a skill. It’s a spiritual quality that we need to learn to cultivate. It’s not given. Or, it’s given as a grace, but we have to do our work at it.
Adam Miller:
Yeah, I think that’s … I think that hits the nail on the head. If I am not very good at repenting, it’s because I’m afraid to repent. There’s a kind of fear at the heart of my failure to repent, and learning how to repent turns, in the end, on learning how to deal with the fear that’s preventing me from doing it.
Thomas McConkie:
Indeed. Yeah. Beautifully said.
Adam Miller:
All right. Well done, Thomas.
Thomas McConkie:
Thanks, Adam. Great to be with you.
