So let’s think of conversasio as a metanoia. It means to change your mind. To change your mind means change the direction in which you’re looking and perceiving. This is what happens when we start to meditate. We are really accepting this work of conversasio, of metanoia, and allowing this work, to begin and to continue within us on a continuous basis. This has big, ultimate consequences for our religious imagination, for how we see God – no longer as an external entity, but as a transcendent being. And transcendent means that we can be caught up into it. We can be united with it, because it is also imminent, it is also present within us, the ground of our being and, paradoxically, also transcendent. And this means we begin to really understand what Jesus is talking about in the farewell discourses in the Gospel of John, where he speaks about the undivided consciousness that he enjoys with the Father, and he is offering to us, to humanity ‘so that they may be one as we are one (Jn 17:22)’.
(The Art of Waiting by Laurence Freeman OSB)
