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Repentance
marks the starting point of our journey as believers. “Jesus began to
preach, saying: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew
4:17). The Greek term metanoia signifies primarily a “change of
mind.” In approaching God, we are to change our mind, stripping
ourselves of all our habitual ways of thinking. We need to reverse our
interior perspective, to stand the pyramid on its head.
Correctly
understood, repentance is not negative, but positive. It means, not
self-pity or even remorse, but conversion, the re-centering of our whole
life on the Trinity. It is to look, not backward with regret, but
forward with hope; not downwards at our own shortcomings, but upwards at
God’s love. It is to see, not merely what we have failed to be, but
what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we
see. To repent is to open our eyes to the light. In this sense,
repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing
state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly
renewed up to the end of our lives. In the words of St. Isaiah of Sketis,
“God requires us to go on repenting until our last breath.” “This
life has been given you for repentance,” says St. Isaac the Syrian.
“Do not waste it on other things.”
To
repent is to wake up. Repentance, change of mind, leads to watchfulness.
The Greek term used here, nepsis, means literally sobriety and
wakefulness – the opposite of a state of drugged or alcoholic stupor.
And so in the context of the spiritual life it signifies attentiveness,
vigilance, recollection. When the prodigal son of Jesus’ parable
repented, it is said that “he came to himself” (Luke 15:17). A
person who is “watchful” is one who has come to himself, who does
not daydream, drifting aimlessly under the influence of passing
impulses, but who possesses a sense of direction and purpose.
Watchfulness
means, among other things, to be present where we are – at this
specific point in space, at this particular moment in time. All too
often, we are scattered and dispersed. We are living, not alertly in the
present, but with nostalgia for the past or with misgiving and wishful
thinking for the future. While we are indeed required responsibly to
plan for the future, anxiety over remote possibilities that lie
altogether beyond our immediate control is sheer waste of our spiritual
energies. “Do not be anxious about tomorrow,” says the Lord. “Each
day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34).
The
watchful person, therefore, is gathered into the here and now. He is the
one who seizes the kairos, the decisive moment of opportunity,
the one who understands this “sacrament of the present moment” and
lives within it.
Growing
in watchfulness and self-knowledge, the traveler upon the Christian Way
begins to acquire the gift of discrimination or discernment. This
acts as a spiritual sense of taste. Just as the physical sense of taste,
if healthy, tells us at once whether food is mouldy or wholesome, so the
spiritual taste, if developed through ascetic effort and prayer, enables
us to distinguish between the varying thoughts and impulses within us.
Discernment
is the ability to distinguish between what is evil and what is good,
between the superfluous and meaningful, between the fantasies inspired
by the devil and the images marked upon our imagination by heavenly
archtypes.
Through
discernment, we begin to take more careful note of what is happening
within us and so learn to guard the heart. “Guard your heart
with all diligence” (Proverbs 4:23). When the heart is mentioned, it
is to be understood in the full, biblical sense: the heart signifies not
simply the physical organ in the chest, nor simply the emotions and
affections, but the spiritual center of our being, the human person as
made in God’s image – the deepest and truest self, the inner shrine
to be entered only through sacrifice.
An
essential aspect of guarding the heart is warfare against the
passions. By
‘passion’ here is meant not just sexual lust, but any disordered
appetite or longing that violently takes possession of the soul: anger,
jealousy, gluttony, avarice, lust for power, pride, and the rest. Many of the Fathers treat the passions as something intrinsically
evil, that is to say, as inward diseases alien to man’s true nature.
Some of them, however, adopt a more positive standpoint,
regarding the passions as dynamic impulses originally placed in man by
God, and so fundamentally good, although at present distorted by sin.
On this second and more subtle view, our aim is not to eliminate
the passions but to redirect their energy. Uncontrolled rage must be turned into righteous indignation,
spiteful jealousy into zeal for the truth, sexual lust into an eros
that is pure in its fervour. The passions, then are to be purified, not killed; to be
educated, not eradicated; to be used positively, not negatively. To ourselves and to others we say, not ‘Suppress’, but
‘Transfigure.’
This
effort to purify the passions needs to be carried out on the level of
both soul and body. On the
level of the soul they are purified through prayer, through the regular
use of the sacraments of Confession and communion, through daily reading
of Scripture, through feeding our mind with the thought of what is good,
through practical acts of loving service to others. On the level of the body they are purified above all through
fasting and abstinence, and through frequent prostrations during the
time of prayer. Knowing
that man is not an angle but a unity of body and soul, the Orthodox
Church insists upon the spiritual value of bodily fasting. We do not fast because there is anything in itself unclean about
the act of eating and drinking. Food
and drink are on the contrary God’s gift, from which we are to partake
with enjoyment and gratitude. We
fast, not because we despise the divine gift, but so as to make
ourselves aware that it is indeed a gift – so as to purify our eating
and drinking, and to make them, no longer a concession to greed, but a
sacrament and means of communion with the Giver. Understood in this way, ascetic fasting is directed, not against
the body, but against the flesh. Its
aim is not destructively to weaken the body, but creatively to render
the body more spiritual.
Purification
of the passions leads eventually, by God’s grace, to what Evagrius
terms apatheia or ‘dispassion’. By this he means, not a negative condition of indifference or
insensitivity in which we no longer feel temptation, but a
positive state of reintegration and spiritual freedom in which we no
longer yield to temptation. Perhaps apatheia can best be translated ‘purity of
heart’. It signified
advancing from instability to stability, from duplicity to simplicity or
singleness of heart, from the immaturity of fear and suspicion to the
maturity of innocence and trust. For
Evagrius dispassion and love are integrally connected, as the two sides
of a coin. If you lust, you
cannot love. Dispassion
means that we are no longer dominated by selfishness and uncontrolled
desire, and so we become capable of true love.
The
‘dispassioned’ person, so far from being apathetic, is the one whose
heart burns with love for God, for other humans, for every living
creature, for all that God has made. As St. Isaac the Syrian writes:
when a man with such a heart as this thinks of the creatures
and looks at them, his eyes are filled with tears because of the
overwhelming compassion that presses upon his heart. The heart of such a man grows tender, and he cannot endure to
hear of or look upon any injury, even the smallest suffering, inflicted
upon anything in creation. Therefore
he never ceases to pray with tears even for the dumb animals, for the
enemies of truth, and for all who do harm to it, asking that they may be
guarded and receive God’s mercy. And for the reptiles also he prays with a great compassion, which
rises up endlessly in his heart, after the example of God.
Bishop
Kallistos (Ware) |
