Time to Repent-Whoopee!
by
Frederica Mathewes-Green (Feb 2003)
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 My
husband came into my office one day to find me frowning at the computer
screen. "I'm stuck," I said. "I can't figure out how to make repentance
sound appealing."
In the ten years since I became a member of the Orthodox Church, that's
been the biggest surprise to me: the unfolding joy of repentance. Every
year about this time we get onto the long on-ramp to Lent, which will
begin March 10 and last for seven long weeks till Easter (we call it
Pascha). It's an intensely penitential time, marked by many extra church
services and intensified fasting. I can't wait.
That doesn't make immediate sense, I know. It's hard to explain. When I
first became Orthodox, Lent was simply baffling to me. I went out and
bought a case of tuna, not knowing that we try to abstain from fish
along with meat, cheese, and other dairy products. The extra services
were poetically beautiful but weren't they, well, a little redundant? If
we say "Lord, have mercy" once, isn't that enough? Why do we keep
begging?
Gradually it began to make sense. As someone said to me, "We say 'Lord,
have mercy' forty times in a row because we don't mean it till the 37th
time." All these spiritual disciplines are for our own benefit, not
God's. God doesn't need us to grovel. But we need our view of reality
corrected, because it tends to be self-flattering and askew. When we see
things clearly, repentance comes naturally, and strangely enough, it
feels like a relief.
Most of our lives we are spent in self-defense mode. We're comparing
ourselves with others and trying to decide where we stand on the scale
of righteousness. We think that God will overlook our failings because
there are so many wicked people in the newspaper, or because he sees
what (or who) we have to put up with.
Furthermore, if we're Christian we're always hearing that God loves us
just the way we are, and that Jesus has paid for all our sins, so it
looks like there's nothing left to do. We can spend this life watching
TV. Yet we have to ask: why are our lives so tedious and uninspired? Why
do we who claim to be Christian behave no better (kinder, more justly,
more honestly) than those who don't? Is this whole life just waiting
around to go to heaven, killing time at the mall?
When we read the New Testament it's clear that early Christians
experienced something a lot more exciting than we do-something
transforming, in fact. In the Bible and other early writings they
describe "life in Christ" in terms that are vigorous rather than
stagnant; they were being changed day by day into the likeness of his
glory. The most distinctive thing about the way early Christians
describe their lives is *energy*. God is at work! Look out! Amazing
things are happening!
Some of those amazing things, of course, were miracles, healings, and
acts of great heroism. But these weren't external occurrences; they grew
from lives that had been profoundly transformed. Miracles and martyrdoms
were signs of change deep in the heart, so that people weren't what they
had been before Christ. They were like trees that had been pruned and
trimmed to bear good fruit.
And that brings us full circle. If you want to be transformed, you'll
have to change. If you're going to change, you have to admit you need to
change. You have to look inside, where it's dusty and cobwebbed, and let
the light start to shine in.
This is why repentance feels like a relief. It's admitting the truth
about ourselves-stuff God already knows, but which we go to exhausting
lengths to deny. Once it's in the open, we can deal with it, and start
to see things change. We may even see miracles, even if they're just in
our own behavior: more hopeful, more compassionate, less cranky.
So we Orthodox begin Lent with the service of Forgiveness Vespers, in
which every member of the congregation asks forgiveness from every other
member. We undertake a strenuous fast, not because those foods are
"unclean" or we're trying to pay for our sins, but because we want to
strengthen self-control. Say no to an éclair today, and you can say no
to an angry outburst tomorrow. All these things we do in the company of
a family of worshippers, mutually supporting each other, praying
together, and trading recipes for dairy-free pizza.
In the first years, Lent was bewildering to me. Later, it just seemed
hard. Last year, it was a spiritual mountaintop. I don't know how to
explain why repentance is a path to joy, or how to make it appealing. I
think you have to come find out for yourself.
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