Turning Back (Part I)
What is required of us above all is an entreaty, a cry of trust and love de profondis, from the depths of our heart. For a moment we must lose our balance, must see in a flash of clarity the meaninglessness of suffering, the ripping apart of our protective covering of happiness or moral virtue. Remember how often in the Gospels Christ attacks the Pharisees. Remember, in Crime and Punishment, the terror which seizes Sonia, the humble prostitute, when she reads the Gospel of the raising of Lazarus to Raskolnikov, the contemptible superman who discovers that he is after all only a murderer. Remember, in the same book, the monologue of the grotesque Marmeladov, Sonia’s father, who by his baseness, cowardice and drunkenness has lost his family. He, the fallen, just before his death, gives this account of the Last Judgment: ‘Then Christ will say to us, Come you also! Come you drunkards! Come you weaklings! Come you depraved! And he will say to us, Vile creatures, you are in the image of the beast and you bear his mark. All the same, you come too!
‘And the wise and prudent will say, Lord, why are you welcoming them? And he will say, O wise and prudent, I am welcoming them because not one of them has ever judged himself worthy. And he will stretch out his arm to us, and we shall fall at his feet, and burst into sobs, and then we shall understand everything, everything! Lord, your kingdom come!’
As we begin the Christian life we need to discover our own finiteness, and at the same time our longing for the infinite, that we are not self-sufficient, that we have not the source of joy within ourselves, that at every moment we must receive ourselves at the Father’s merciful hand – and this word ‘Father’ resounds with all the depth of the Unknowable and the wonderful trust of the child discovering his origin. In the Gospel the very root of sin is the pretense that we can save ourselves by our own effort, that we can find security in ourselves and one another. This was the condition the Pharisees had been brought to in the end by their strict keeping of the law. To save ourselves we must give up all security, any notion of being self-sufficient; we must look at the world with wonder, gratefully receiving it anew, with its mysterious promise of the infinite. Everything – the world, history, other people and myself – can be a source of revelation, because through everything we can discern, like a watermark, the face of the Risen Christ, the Friend who secretly shares with each of us the bread of affliction and the wine of mirth. To this paradox, that the Inaccessible has allowed himself to be crucified for us to reveal that ‘God is love’, our only response can be one of humility and trust, tearing ourselves away from all that holds us back, in our desire to worship, even in the midst of our suffering. The publicans and harlots enter the Kingdom before the just because they are well aware that they cannot save themselves; knowing the wretchedness of their condition, they are open to the Love that has come within their reach.
So the turning back is not only the result of guilty feelings. It is the consciousness of a desire that cannot be satisfied, the inner emptiness crying out to be filled with it knows not what. ‘The hearts of human beings,’ says Nicolas Cabasilas, ‘were made great enough to contain God himself (Life in Christ, 2.E). If they do not contain the Uncreated they will turn their desire towards created objects, and then only nothingness can spring forth, for every person is a gaping space waiting to be filled with God.
Repentance entails consciously becoming ‘the one who thirsts’, and at the same time recognizing the wretched nature of the idols with which we try to deceive this desire; the wretched nature of ‘this world’, the net of passions in which we think to catch creation while forgetting the Creator; the wretchedness of our own role, or roles, in the great theatre of ‘this world’. Then we discover the basic truth about ourselves, that we are loved, and it is because we are loved that we exist. And love responds to love. The awareness of being loved and the response that it unlocks are the only criterion of repentance.
~Adapted from Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
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