Metanoia in a World of Paranoia

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Lent is a forty-day journey that mirrors the various wilderness scenes and motifs throughout the story of God. It draws us in and forces us to wrestle with the pervasive human condition of brokenness, disorder, fragmentation, and the disease of sin. As we become increasingly aware of this predicament, it sheds greater light on the state of our wellbeing, or lack thereof, as modern Westerners. We find ourselves more aware of brokenness, yet seemingly more stuck in our brokenness than in times past. Maybe this is an illusion, or maybe this is fact. Either way, our “being” isn’t so “well.” With our age marked as the age of anxiety, and according to the Family Systems theorist Edwin Friedman, “systemic emotional regression,” we are witnessing the “perversion of progress” (A Failure of Nerve). Therefore, Lent forces us to apprehend and contemplate our chronic paranoia. If we want well-being, we have no choice but to consider thoughtfully how we are to respond to such a moment and way of living. 

So how are we to respond? We respond to paranoia with metanoia—with repentance.

Paranoia is a Greek word akin to metanoia, but it doesn’t get much airtime during Lent or many theological spaces at all. Clearly there is a connection. There is a theological relationship with a broken social psychological phenomenon, a marker of our time and condition. The two must become more acquainted. 

To clarify, paranoia is defined as unjustified suspicion and mistrust of other people. This irrational sense and feeling that someone is out to get you or hurt you, or is withholding something from you, sounds like Genesis 3. It is distinct from anxiety in that it is uniquely geared toward our lack of trust. In other words, it is a specific form of an anxious feeling or thought. And not only do we characterize our cultural moment by heightened anxiety, but also heightened  mistrust, skepticism, and suspicion, a kind of paranoia.

Back to Lent: of all the wilderness moments throughout the story, the most glaring is the forty years that the Israelites “wander” in the desert. What was meant to be an eleven-day journey took forty years—thirteen hundred times longer! Not only does it take forty years, but the Israelites collectively exercise odd behavior: they walk in a circle. This must be what it means to wander. They find themselves walking around Mt. Sinai, constantly rewalking and retracing their steps through the desert, year after year for four decades. Why is that? Why are they walking in circles? 

They had an unjustified suspicion and mistrust of YHWH. Look at Deuteronomy 1:32-33: “In spite of this, [YHWH’s deliverance from Egypt] you did not trust in the Lord your God, who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go.” By unjustifiably mistrusting YHWH, the people of Israel walk in a circle of paranoia. In doing so, they miss the way. Likewise, when we are paranoid, we walk in circles, moving but going nowhere, often as a means of protecting ourselves from potential harm and the unknown. As a result, we miss the presence, we miss the way, and we miss the fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). This is because we miss repentance. We miss metanoia.

In the wilderness, the Israelites are called to repent. In Lent, we are called to repent. New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley writes, “Lent is inescapably about repentance” (Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal). For us actually to escape the wilderness of our condition, to escape paranoia and walking in circles, we must repent. This word across the Scriptures has a double meaning. The Hebrew word for “repent” is shub, and it more literally means, “turn around.” Notice the directional nature of the word. YHWH went ahead of the Israelites to show them the way they should go, but instead of repenting and turning around in that direction, they unjustifiably relented as a way of self-preservation and control, thus missing true flourishing and well-being. 

They valued protection over presence. Overprotective people can easily be drawn into paranoia. Former Dutch Psychologist and Priest Adrian van Kaam notes, “excessively protective dispositions turn out to be the greatest resistance to free and joyous unfolding” (Formation of the Human Heart). When we hide under a pillow, we run the risk of suffocating.

This is the pattern of sin—missing the mark, or missing the way. Resisting this way and directive of YHWH leads to walking in circles, to paranoia, sin, and suffocation. We must heed the call and turn, not just from our way, but toward his way.. 

A changing of the way requires a changing of the mind. Herein we find the meaning of the New Testament word for repentance, metanoia. Repentance, escaping the wilderness of paranoia, isn’t just a change of direction, but a change of mind, drawing our attention beyond our current situation. Paranoia forces us to look down at the ground; metanoia lifts our eyes beyond, to the heavens. Given the unhealthy mental implications of paranoia, metanoia is a rather plausible corrective. 

But, what is “the mind?” It is much more than neural-chemical reactions and brain activity. Dan Siegel, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at UCLA and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute has defined the mind in this way: “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.” 

To counteract paranoia, or unjustified mistrust, metanoia urges us to change our mind, and if this definition describes what the mind is at a psychological and neurological level, metanoia is much more than an apology or feeling of guilt. It is a reordering and reorganizing of one’s whole life. True repentance, therefore, is a change of direction and a change of order.  It is a re-integrating of thoughts, understandings, relationships, and purpose in light of what YHWH has done, and more so, in light of what Jesus has done. We call this “re-membering.” To remember what God has done in the past helps us to re-member in the present. It is a means of re-storying. When we remember, our mind is re-membered, and we are re-storied, unlocking the suffocating dead bolt of an unjustified mistrust and paranoia. 

Remembering has a way of reorganizing and reordering our internal processing system: God has done it before, he will do it again. Remembering increases our capacity to trust. It is the story of the original liberation and way out of captivity that enables us to escape the paranoid circles of our current wilderness. And wouldn’t it be so, that the one who does the delivering and rescuing of our paranoia is also the divine Logos, the one by whom the entire cosmos was ordered and organized. 

As we experience Lent and reflect on the human proclivity toward paranoia and missing the way, may we re-member, re-order, and return to the One who has liberated once before. There was a justifiable reason for trusting then, and there is a justifiable reason for trusting in our Lenten wilderness today. For this reason, let us take our mind beyond our encircled predicament and toward his way of promise and “land of peace” (Lev. 26:6). This is well-being. The exodus of our paranoia is metanoia. 

Spencer Loman is a Wesleyan Pastor at Emmaus Church in Greensboro, NC, and a ThD student at Kairos University.