This is an article I found after visiting Madonna House in 2015. I believe I found it and printed it in 2018. I think this is a good attitude to have for these times of lifelong learning. I am copying the whole thing; hope this is okay. This analogy about having to unwind a ball of yarn after making mistakes for a long time is worth sharing widely.
As per my endorsement of Alex Havard’s conclusion that Catholicism can be timid and pusillanimous, I’ve translated a few Christian-Catholic words from the original into my own new New Age (=psycho-spiritual) equivalents. There are stages of the spiritual journey where timidity and awe and regret are the right sentiments, but I think my New Age vocabulary suit our times, and a spirituality for the second half of life.
I made the mistake of trying to speak Christian as a foreign language, and incorporated all these words (forgive, repent, convert, conversion, metanoia) in what I said to Catholics, with the result that they thought I was either nuts, a religious fanatic. However, I thought this was the insider terminology Catholics used to talk to each other, and I wanted them to know I had started to learn their language. In the monocultural small community of Catholics in Peterborough, this was an epic fail.
Wrong For So Long by Fr. Bob Wild
There are many obstacles to conversion (=growing, changing). One of them is the difficulty of admitting even to ourselves that we may have been sinning (=not up to our own or external standards) or doing something stupid for a long, long time. Since this is a hard pill to swallow, we put up tremendous defenses.
One day I was spinning wool in the poustinia. After you have spun two balls of single yarn, you ply them together to make the two-ply yarn. Well, I was happily plying away but things weren’t going too smoothly. No matter. Perhaps the wheel needed oil or something. I barged ahead.
But the spinning kept getting harder and harder to do. When I had almost completed the whole ball, I suddenly realized what was wrong. I had plied the yarn in reverse!
That was my sudden moment of “enlightenment,” the moment when I realized that I’d been doing it all wrong! Not only that but now to “get it right” I would have to go through a long, messy process. I would have to unravel the yarn and start all over again.
This initial realization was very painful; I could hardly get up the energy to begin again. And as I did, the wool went all over the poustinia—on the rafters and the floor; it looked like a huge spider web.
But once I accepted the truth that I had done something stupid, it got easier and easier. Then at last, as I approached the final rewinding, I had a great sense of joy and gratitude.
It takes a great deal of humility (=clear-eyed self-awareness) to face the truth of what we see. Perhaps the older we get, the harder it is.
And our long-standing defects are the hardest to uncover and repent of (=get over). We need to fight the tendency to deny what we see, to make believe it’s not as bad as we think. It probably is as bad as we think!
At this point, temptations can rear their heads. Discouragement: “If I’ve been wrong in this area, maybe my whole life is one big mistake.” Sadness: “All my efforts have been wasted. There’s no sense in trying any more.” Self-pity: “I’ll never be able to live right.” These are lies and we need to renounce (=observe, look at but then let go of) them.
And this is an important moment of decision. We’re either going to admit our blindness and seek change, or we’re going to cover up what we see and continue on as if nothing had been revealed to us.
It was very difficult for me to start unravelling that dumb yarn. “All that time wasted!” But as I proceeded, joy was restored.
For there is joy, though usually not at first, in facing reality and doing something about it. If we break something, we can pick up the pieces. If we make a mistake, we can admit it and ask forgiveness (=acknowledge a mistake out loud in words to the person affected so as to not gaslight them, deepening rather than shattering your shared reality with that person, and then letting it go).
And, if we discover that we’ve been sinful (=made a mistake, which is an essential part of becoming / learning) or immature or childish in some area of our life for a long, long time, the really mature and realistic and life-giving thing to do is admit it and unravel the results as best we can.
That’s what repentance(=change, growth) is—admitting that we have been travelling down the wrong road—like when we’re out driving and we discover that we’ve gone 200 miles in the wrong direction.
Facing long-standing faults is very hard, and it takes a great grace (=movement of the Spirit, serendipity, synchronicity) and a big heart to repent (=change, grow). If you do, you will know both the pain of having wasted many years and the joy of finally living in the light.
