What does ‘the Heart' and "Repent' have to do with reach other?

While I was in my intern year of seminary I was asked to take the Meyers-Briggs personality assessment.  It is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.  It offers 16 personality types.

You can google it if you want to know more.

The person assessing my results was sitting, at a desk, with his back to me.  Without turning around he said to me: “You don’t like to think at all, do you?” My response was quick: “No I really don’t.”  To which he replied: “Well you are one point away from not thinking at all.”

My personality grid was an INFP.

I can’t remember what all of the letters represent; but the I refers to intuitiveness.  Which, simply put, mean I make most of my decisions on my feelings. 

I tell you this because I have learned, through the years, that this revelation has been quite useful in my ministry and my passionate study of scripture.

As I look back over the years I see myself living with a feeling that there was something that the scholars, and church leaders, were leaving out of Jesus’ true character and purpose.

  

It had something very much to do with the heart of all Jesus bought and taught.

Then just recently I have been reading about, what I will call, Centering Spiritually.  And Cynthia Bourgeault’s writings have confirmed the feelings I have had all these years. 

I am thinking of two very specific terms.  “Heart” and “Repent.”

“The heart has a different way of perceiving.  Rather than dividing and conquering, it connects with a seamless and indivisible reality through a whole different way of organizing the informational field.  And it’s ours for the choosing…..In wisdom, the heart is primarily an organ of spiritual perception,….The heart picks up from the emotions, from our sense of proportion, from intuition, from images and archetypes…..and keeps us aligned with our innermost, with what we truly know.” (pa. 35 - 36)

So very cool!

Now this kind of information is soooooo confirming to a person who was married to a Statistician for 24 years. And to be quite honest, my intuition drove him absolutely looney.  

Now to the good news about the term repent.

She gives a bit of an introduction to the Christian use fo the word repent.  And then goes to the Greek:  

It means: “to go beyond the mind” or “go into the large mind.”  The repentance that Jesus really is talking about means to go beyond your little egoic operating system that says, “I think, therefore I am,” and try out the other one — the big one — “I am, therefore I think.”(p. 37)

Then after more discussion on the parable of rich landowner who hires workers all day long and then pays them all the same wage. (Matt. 20:1-15)

She sums it up so well:  “This parable does indeed offer fair warning that what Jesus is up to is hugely more subversive than “Jesus is once and he wants us to be nice too.” Like all good Zen masters, he is out to completely short-circuit our mental wiring so the we are catapulted into a whole new way of seeing and being.”(p.39)

So now what do you think “repent” means?