Dustin Mitchell

The Heroic Work of Repentance

This time of year, we hear again and again about how much emphasis places on the nuances of how to address harm of all kinds.

​​The Hebrew word that generally gets translated as "repentance" is t'shuvah, which literally means "returning." In modern Hebrew, can mean "returning" in the sense of "I returned home after my trip." In the context, t'shuvah is about returning to the you know you're capable of being with and .

There are five steps to t'shuvah: confession (naming and owning the harm that we have caused); (beginning to change so that we don't do it again through , , ourselves, , and are great starts); amendments (material or non-material acts of repair to those harmed); (a genuine apology to those , which focuses on their needs being met); and (finally making different the next time you have the chance to do the same thing.

But before we take those , we must grapple with our . Owning up to the hurt we may have caused someone else is difficult, even when it's as small as the thing we said that didn't land as we hoped. It is that much more to face a to a one, a to be there for someone in , an outburst, a choice to be complicit in , , or other actions with real, .

Sometimes we might resist owning our less optimal choices because we feel or . We might because we don't want to face the inevitable of coming clean. Maybe sometimes - or a lot of the time - we resist owning the we've perpetrated because it would require us to face the ways in which we are than our self-conception. Facing how we haven't been our best selves is agonizing and and might require our internal ; we are as and as everyone else. We, too, have work to do.

We have two options: show up with self-awareness and , or minimize, ignore, and . It is awfully tempting to try to minimize the impact of our or it with reasons. There are always reasons. We all do this, at least some of the time.

don't harm. Reasons don't fix harm. Fixing harm is only possible when we face the gap between the we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and the of our . Only when we summon our to cross that gulf of and face who we are and who we have been - even if it our story of ourselves - can we the harm we've done and become the kind of who might be able to do next time. And that is what's truly heroic.