"Repent!" John says or rather screams the way you would scream at someone about to be run over by a bus.

I think repentance has got a bad rap. Whenever we hear the word, I think most of us conjure up an image of ourselves as miserable worms who deserve nothing but damnation. It is no wonder we detest John the Baptist so much!

But let me offer another view of repentance, one that just may have more to do with that prophet from the wilderness than we realize.

Repentance comes when you travel for a month living out of a backpack and return home to realize just how little you really need. The house seems overburdened with extraneous junk and you wonder where it all came from and how it managed to make it inside your home.

Repentance can happen for you as it did for me long ago when our joint annual income could be measured in thousands rather than tens of thousands and we qualified for poverty assistance and were, even with the romance of time, enormously happy.

Someone once told me that repentance came for them in the middle of the night when they woke up and felt a lump and wondered whether it was something or nothing and began to see life in a different way. She pondered on those who mattered to her and how she had treated them and how she felt about them. Repentance came in the middle of the night and her feelings about this life changed, really changed.

Repentance came for a retired couple who took a month out of their lives to live and work among the poorest of the poor in Mexico and returned home forever changed.

It has been my experience in talking with hundreds and hundreds of people about their spiritual journey that this is precisely the kind of experience they are searching for. A change that brings meaning and purpose into their lives, an openness to seeing things in a new way, a preparation for the arrival of God. Expounding upon their wretchedness, their sinfulness, their hopelessness has hardly seemed an effective pastoral tool. Inviting them instead to discover the kind of perspective that comes with this new understanding of repentance may be the best means of preparing the way of the Lord.