Both John the Baptist and his cousin, Jesus, preached about the need for repentance. However, whereas John was motivated by the desire to help us escape God’s imagined wrath and vengeance, Jesus wanted to help us reestablish a relationship with a loving God who waits for us when we drift away.
John and Jesus had a different understanding of God. Jesus had numinous vision—that is, he was filled with a sense of the presence of divinity. It wasn’t so much that Jesus brought the kingdom of God to us; Christ (and thus the kingdom of God) had existed for all time. What Jesus did was open our eyes to God who was already present among us. Our response to that presence is awe, profound gratitude, and the desire to serve those in need of healing. In this way, we become participants in the revelation and unfolding of God’s kingdom.
As persons who live in community, we attempt to help each other maintain this numinous vision. When Emily Bauer entered the novitiate on December 7, Sr. Esther Fangman offered the following thoughts:
One might say that we as a Benedictine community try to live an embodiment of the divinity already present among us. We try to become a place where the mysterious presence of the divinity can be found by how we live. We do fall short—yet this is what we want to be. And Emily, we are asking you to live here in this numinous reality with us. Be influenced, be changed, be vulnerable, and we will work each day to do the same so that God may be found.
Yes, we are called to repent—not because we are sinners in the hands of an angry God but because our preoccupation with our own desires keeps us from seeing God who is always with us and responding to the love that God forever offers us.
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