June 22, 2025: A Primal Change of Mind

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

A Primal Change of Mind

Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

given for the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church

The Nativity of St. John the Baptist, June 22, 2025:

Isaiah 40:1-11, Luke 1:57-80

St. John the Baptist is the patron saint of our church, and today is the day we celebrate his birth. St. John was the cousin of Jesus, the son of an elderly couple who had never had children and who were so old they were thought not to be capable of bearing children, and yet, he came through them. He is said to be the one to “prepare the way of the Lord,” the forerunner of Jesus, the prophet who would get the people ready for the Christ by preaching what has been translated since the 4^th century as “repentance.” What does the word repentance mean to all of you? [Pause to allow congregation to offer their thoughts]. In Richard Rohr’s book The Universal Christ, Rohr says that the Greek word that St. Jerome translated as “repentance”, metanoia, would better be translated as “a primal change of mind, worldview, or…way of processing, and only by corollary about a specific change in behavior. The common misunderstanding puts the cart before the horse.”[1]  It seems that true change in behavior does follow this primal change of mind, which flips us outward and changes us from being narcissistic or self-referential toward recognizing God everywhere, and serving the divine in everything.

This primal change of mind, metanoia, is what Luke’s gospel describes when Zechariah says this in today’s reading from Luke 1:

Thus God has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors. . .to grant that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve God without fear…The dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

This dawn from on high that breaks upon those who sit in darkness evokes primordial creation, when God says, let there be Light, and there was Light, days before God creates the sun and the moon. There is an inner Light within each one of us, a deep knowing, which is like a cello string that vibrates when we hear the truth. We are all meant to see and be transformed by the truth. And the truth is desperately needed in today’s world, a truth that can transcend tribalism of every kind. Tribalism and dualistic thinking in religion and nationality are perverting our national politics and pitting families and communities against one another, harming us and the earth like a cancer, and the vulnerable are the first to suffer. What we are doing to immigrants and trans people and other nations and the Earth is wrong. We need the truth. And what is the truth?

I just said that we need a truth that can transcend tribalism, but ironically truth is understood contextually. Last week the Rev. Mark Olson preached about his ministry among the Ojibwe, and he spoke of what he called “the Gospel according to White Earth.” We need the truth, the gospel, for this community in this moment and this place. St. John the Baptist discovered the truth by spending his entire life in the wilderness, being schooled by the Spirit through the Earth herself, witnessing the endless rhythm of death and resurrection in everything that is: summer and winter, the tides of the ocean, day and night, the moon waxing and waning, the heart beating, inhale and exhale of humans and animals and trees. And then he came speaking to the people about the primal change of mind needed to transform us from the inside out.

Perhaps some of you remember a book from the 1990’s by Eckhart Tolle called The Power of Now. The author describes a primal change of mind that utterly changed his life, and I’d like to read a little of his story to you. He says this:

Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. . .One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. …Everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.

“I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with. Maybe…only one of them is real.”

I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. . . inside myself… Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.

I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.[2]

He goes on to describe five months of uninterrupted bliss like this, which began to fade in intensity, but which never left him, and it changed the entire trajectory of his life.

The truth as Eckhart Tolle saw it was that there were layers of illusion in his belief about himself that clouded his ability to see the nature of reality. You notice that when this illusion was stripped away through great suffering, Eckhart Tolle was flipped outward. He truly saw and heard the world around him as if for the first time instead of being perpetually curved in on himself. Awe and deep respect and love resulted. He experienced a kind of death and resurrection, the primordial pattern of the universe: the death of a self that was an illusion, and the birth of who he really was, which allowed him to see the truth of everyone else as well.

Each of us needs this primal change of mind, even though it will look different for each one of us. We need this now more than ever in these deeply distressing times. It seems that we are undergoing a dark night of the collective soul, and perhaps there are collective deaths coming. It feels as if anything is possible in today’s world. But God intimately walks with us to and through death, like a midwife at a birth. The question is, what will help us be able to stay grounded in love instead of fear and loathing and anger, even when no safety is guaranteed and the most terrible things are possible and happening? What will help us love our neighbors, even as we stand for justice and fulfill Jesus’ command to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and welcome the stranger? It is that primal change of mind, which is far more than just knowing. If mere insight could change us, then we would all be working out every day and eating healthy food and never spending too much time on screens, and we would prioritize love and generosity over tasks and numbing. The primal change of mind happens when heart and body and mind meet and are illumined and healed together, when we are freed from the unhealed legacies of the past and the false stories we tell about who we are.

I wish I could give you that experience, but only the Spirit can do that. What we can do together, however, is prepare the way of the Spirit, like John the Baptist. We can become aware of the need for this primal change of mind, this true repentance, not only in others out there but in us right here. Like John, we can retreat to the wilderness when human voices become so sick and distorted that we can no longer see clearly, learn from the natural rhythms of the Earth and our teachers the plants and animals. We can recover the Indigenous soul of our scriptures and see them with fresh eyes. We can be aware of our need for true repentance and ask God for it—and then listen for the whispers of God responding around us all the time. Then truly, the dawn from on high will break upon us who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death and will guide our feet into the way of peace. This is already happening. It is happening in each tiny bit of light shining in the darkness. Let us throw all our weight behind cooperating with this transformation, this primal change, true repentance, that the world may be healed. Amen.

[1] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality can Change everything we See, Hope for, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2021) at 92.

[2] Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, excerpted in his website, accessed June 22, 2025 at https://eckharttolle.com/power-of-now-excerpt/

10am Service