David Wallace is the co-founder and acting chairperson of Metanoia Journey - a contemplative community in Austin, TX. He sat down with pastoral assistant, Jillian Shannon, to explain the core principles of the Metanoia Journey. Please enjoy these valuable insights on the universal human experience and the power of silence and contemplation practices, in his own words.
Metanoia is a Greek term. Meta means beyond, and noia comes from the root word noose, which means mind. So beyond the mind, or changing your mind, changing your direction.
So, big picture, we are a community that exists to do the human journey. I have this long winding life path that brought me to seminary and to lead a community, but I come through the life coaching process. I left the corporate world when I went, huh, it seems like a lot of my misery comes from culturally passed-on belief systems: What you do, how big is your bank account, where you live, who you're with, what you look like, whether you're fit or not.
Henry Nouwen, a Catholic theologian, coined this term, The Three Human Lies. 1: I am what I have. 2: I am what I do. 3: I am what other people say and think about me. And I think probably for 40 years of my life, I bought every lie hook, line and sinker.
I struggle with the word sin. Sin is an archery term, which means to miss the mark. And so this idea of sin in our community isn't that we are consciously choosing to separate ourselves from others, but that we're unconsciously choosing. When I'm lost in the disillusionment of who I truly am, and I unconsciously fall victim to these lies, it leads to thoughts and behaviors and actions that are sinful or that remove me from myself, that remove me from others, and from my relationship with the divine. And so we see this community as people coming as they are, and recognizing that their interior path is vitally important in terms of their own authority about it.
We’ve evolved from calling ourselves a contemplative Christian community, to a contemplative community. The word Christian is so loaded. There’s the doctrine and sola scriptura, and it's about all of these types of things, which are fine… but it’s your inner experience of the divine that commonly unites us. So this is where we kind of span over the interfaith movement. I can create a meditation circle with an atheist, with somebody from the Muslim faith, Hindu, Jew, and everybody's going to have a common experience in the silence.
As Thomas Keating, who's a big teacher in the contemplative Christian tradition, would say God's first word is silence. Everything else is a poor translation. So, this idea of presenting somebody with a doctrine, telling them what they need to believe, putting any kind of position on somebody that induces anything but invitation and love is wrong for us.
Come as you are, come with your doubt, come with your faith. We don't care. This is a place where you can be held. There are other people doing this difficult, often messy human journey together. And the base practices that we focus on at the Metanoia Journey, are contemplative prayer or meditation and what we call inner work. One is a very passive activity. Sitting in silence is a receptive process. You're allowing God's presence and action in your life, and you're learning to let go of control. And then inner work is a system that helps you apply it. Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself. This is the HOW to do that. When I'm identified with my righteousness and my anger and my grudges, how do I loosen that constriction and become open again? The longer that you practice contemplative prayer, meditation, the more the sharp edges of the ego are smoothed out over the years
If you take all the thousands of ways you can meditate, you end up putting them in two categories. One is what they call concentrative, and one is called receptive. Receptive is also known as mindfulness. Meaning, when I'm sitting down and practicing centering prayer, we learn to see thoughts. And when we find ourselves lost in those thoughts, we have a sacred word that brings us back to our center, and it disconnects our connection to that. And that thought floats away. Now, it may come back, but again, you learn to just be aware of it without judgement. You just recognize that you’ve got some anxiety around this particular issue. The issues are in the tissues. Your body holds everything. It’s not something to be ashamed of, not to be kept in the darkness to be avoided or foreboding. No, we need to turn the light on in this closet. And it comes from this very loving place of nobody's broken or wretched or totally depraved.
What we're trying to do is give people a realistic expectation that we don't sit down to do centering prayer meditation for the purpose of being consoled. You're sitting down to intentionally give yourself to the presence of God for 20 minutes. You're putting down the busyness of life because you want to spend 20 minutes with the divine. God is going to use that time to work on me behind the scenes rewiring stuff and doing what God needs to do to me for my life, using the same tools that an agnostic or an atheist would use who's sitting down to meditate because they're doing it for stress reduction.
The difference between meditation and contemplation is your intention behind it. You can practice mindfulness meditation as an atheist, it doesn’t necessarily connotate any kind of spiritual element. Centering prayer or contemplation is saying: the only place that I can find the divine is in my inner self, in the present moment. God's not in front. God's not behind. God's here all the time and saying, come home. And rest.
There's freedom, there's salvation, there's the kingdom of heaven. Call it what you want. For us, the kingdom of heaven is now. [“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”] “Repent” was the mistranslation of metanoia. “Repent” gives the idea of “shape up, you're going to be cast out.” And it's been used very painfully in a lot of circumstances where people suffer from addiction. But Jesus isn’t saying shape up, he’s saying change your mind. If you can experience the kingdom of heaven at hand, here and now, oh, that is a beautiful situation.