Lent & Repentance

Since the death and resurrection of Christ is the foundational mystery of our whole lives, it seems that we ought each year to try to go deeper into our own spiritual process of dying and rising. If we don’t grow we stagnate. If we aren’t better than last year, we are worse. We ask often in the liturgical litanies that we may spend the rest of our lives in peace and repentance. If our repentance is genuine, then peace will be its first fruit.

We have probably already heard a lot about repentance, yet reminders can always be helpful, since we tend to forget in short order what we hear. But hearing about it is not enough; neither is praying about it in church. Doing it is enough, but that’s where most of us falter. The word has to sink into the heart if it is to endure and bear fruit in actual practice. As the Coptic monk Matthew the Poor says, “What the ear hears, the mind forgets; but what the heart hears, time cannot erase.”

There’s a certain ambivalence about the season of Lent. Some people look forward to it as a time in which they receive some encouragement to “clean up their act” in ways that they never get around to during the rest of the year. Others dread it as a time of imposed and often meaningless self-denial, the cultivation of a self-condemning and generally gloomy outlook that has to be tolerated until at length the light of Pascha shines. Still others recognize its value but get hung up on liturgical exaggerations, and they wonder why one day we sing about being freed from all sin and sorrow and condemnation, and the next day we liturgically lament and groan once again. Then there are those who heartily embrace all the penitential prayers and rituals of the season, but who evidently don’t see the connection between these and actually changing their lives.

Where do you fit in? That is perhaps the first thing to discover during this time of preparation for spiritually entering the paschal mystery of our Lord Jesus Christ. I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again: repentance is about change. It is about changing attitudes and behaviors, ways of thinking, speaking, and treating others—doing all these things more according to the mind of Christ than your own. You can go to church and say, “Woe is me! I am a sinner!” all you want, but if you don’t do something about it, you are just making yourself look foolish.

Understood as the effort exerted to make the necessary changes in our “unredeemed” habits of thought and behavior—for the sake of being better able to respond wholeheartedly to the grace of God—the work of repentance is a kind of asceticism. Now before that word begins to conjure up in your mind images of emaciated, sleep-deprived, woebegone flagellants, see the definition given by Matthew the Poor: “Asceticism is the positive activity of the soul by which it counteracts negative activity. It is an exercise in practicing virtues to root out vices and evil habits.” If repentance is the process of change, then ascetical acts are the means by which the process achieves its goal. The goal of repentance is the same as the goal of Christian life as such. Just in case inadequate catechesis or too many years of “conventional Christianity” have dimmed your vision or awareness of the goal, it is this: deification (or divinization, theosis), i.e., the full transfiguration of your life in all its dimensions, through grace and faith, and especially through love—both God’s and yours. “God became man so that man might become God,” as the Fathers liked to say, meaning that by grace God’s own life becomes ours. It is a bold way of expressing what it really means to be fully a member of the Body of Christ.

The gifts of grace we have already received, which begin even now to fulfill God’s “precious and very great promises” (2Peter 1:4), are so far beyond our conscious grasp that many don’t even try to go deeper. They think that these promises are literally too good to be true, and they end up setting their sights way too low, settling for a more intelligible and comfortable mediocrity. But this is not genuine life in Christ. People shop for other religions because the Church seems inadequate, but for anyone to have that thought he must know very little about what Christianity really is, means, and promises.

So where is repentance in all this? To repent is first of all to recognize how much God loves us and to become aware of how little we love God and the persons created in his image. If you’ve ever had one of those “moments of truth” in which you simultaneously recognized the profound gravity of your sin and the merciful love of God, no one has to tell you that repentance requires change and that gratitude is the driving force behind it. Coming to this awareness, we choose to make a firm commitment, expressed in practical actions: to return love for Love, to break sinful habits and acquire virtuous ones, and to learn to forgive, because the Father forgives.

These practical actions will vary from person to person, from situation to situation. Each of us has to examine the areas in which our failures to love are the most grievous, and begin the changes there. If you look within yourself with prayer and honesty, real honesty—all flimsy pious veneers peeled away—you will know what needs to be changed, i.e., how you have to repent. If fasting facilitates the necessary changes, then fast; if praying, then pray; if going out of your way to do good to others, then do it. The changes will have to be serious and thoroughgoing, and this will take discipline and effort. The basic point is our need to change for the better, in grateful response to the overflowing love of God. The goal of our spiritual life is to “be like Him,” to “see Him as He is. And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself as He is pure” (1John 3:2-3). The purification that is growth in love does not end when Lent does. It’s useless to come to the end of Lent and say, with relief, “There, I did it, I performed everything that was prescribed. Now pass the ham and cheese, and don’t trouble me about penance until next year.”

Lent is not about self-condemnation, and Easter is not about self-indulgence. Neither is Lent merely about penance nor Easter merely about singing “Christ is risen!” Both are fundamentally about deification: interiorly, expressed in all the dimensions of the mystical/sacramental life—and exteriorly: moving from self-centeredness to other-centeredness, from self-absorption (even in the guise of monitoring “spiritual progress”) to the self-forgetful building up of the body of Christ in the world. The change that is repentance is meant to build continuously on the Rock that is Christ. Understand repentance as change, change as learning to love, learning to love as transformation, transformation as becoming like God, becoming like God as deification, deification as being immersed the mystery of divine life and joy, which reaches into eternity. Thus repentance sets us on the path to the fullness of life in God.

Repent! Rejoice! Don’t look so gloomy; God loves you! Start living your faith as a meaningful and intimate relationship with the God who is Love, and your repentance will flow as easily as your rejoicing. You will want to change, for you will want to please Him who loved you unto death, and whose love shall be your everlasting life.