Once again we enter the salvific days of the Great Quadragesima [the 40-day Great Lent], and once again hear the Church lovingly call us to repent.
Unfortunately, some of our contemporaries tend to consider
repentance to be some servile emotion, almost a manifestation of cowardice.
That idea is a not new one: in antiquity, Stoic philosophy considered
repenting to be a manifestation of weakness and inconsistency, an attempt to
hide from the consequences of one’s actions.
The Gospels, however, bear witness to something else.
Christ begins His preaching with a call to repentance: He says “Repent,” and
adds “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 4:17).
The Greek term “to repent” literally means “to change
one’s mind,” i.e. to change that attitude and tendency of mind one
recognizes to be improper. Thus, repentance is a conscious differentiation, a
specific recognition of the boundary between good and evil, between light and
darkness: without a realization that light exists, we could not comprehend or
appreciate the fact of darkness itself.
To renounce evil in ourselves, we need to not simply see
good, but to love good, feel its power, and believe in it.
On that basis alone, repentance is a manifestation of spiritual power and
not weakness.
It is born of the intuition of good and of love for God, as
the Source of that good, but it is also the manifestation of love for man in
ourselves, for the image of God instilled in our hearts.
When we become conscious of that clear distinction between good and evil,
almost every person, except perhaps saints especially marked by God can apply to
himself Pushkin’s words, “…and in disgust reading my life/ I tremble and
swear…”
Two possible paths flow out of this feeling: the path
upward, to reconciliation with our conscience and with God, Who never ceases to
love us, or downward, into the darkness of despondency and despair, when it
seems to us that there is no power on earth or in ourselves sufficient to revive
and correct us.
The entire experience of Christian sanctity and spiritual
struggle insists upon the possibility of the first path, and persistently warns
against taking the second. Despondency
is the beginning of spiritual death, something described by Gogol as being
“cursed by God.” With tragic power, Gogol felt the evil of the world and
focused on Christ as the only One to save us from that evil.
Man feels an impetus to repent and correct himself more
acutely as he senses [approaching] death. However,
that is spiritually justified and healthy only in the sense that awareness of
the inevitability of physical death, whose appointed time we do not know, is an
incessant self-examination of our transitory existence in the face of eternity.
But remembrance of death should not turn into a
renunciation of the meaning of our earthly existence.
Despite its limitations and fragility, it is a gift from God; it is the
sphere in which we create, in which our creative activity operates, our path of
ascent toward eternity. Spiritual flight from thoughts of death, striving to
forget about death, is something impermissible.
Yet, we should not live for the sake of death, for that would
be blasphemy, disparagement of our God-given gift of life.
For the Christian, death can and should be joyous, for it is also a
continuation of our life, the translation from the transient to the eternal.
Thus, repentance is not some fruitless languor and
self-criticism, but rather а bright spiritual struggle toward renewal and
reconciliation with God.
One of the teachers of the Church says of the parable of
the prodigal son that, were the Gospels to be lost, and were the only words
spoken by Christ during His time on earth only that single parable were to come
down to us, we would discover within it the fullness of the Christian Gospel.
The sufferings of the prodigal son in that distant foreign land, his
decision to return to his Father’s house, and the joy of forgiveness and
return to his Father, Who never stopped waiting for His son – the images
contained in that parable express all of our spiritual fate; in it the very
meaning of repentance is revealed.
May the Lord grant that in the approaching period of the
Quadragesima [Great Lent], we might all be cleansed of the foulness of sin and
might be reconciled to God and to our neighbor.
Greetings on the coming Great Lent!
Archpriest Victor Potapov