Merest Faithfulness

Sometimes, especially in Lent, I feel we Christians have a tendency to confuse the idea of repentance with our (or our parents'!) ideas of ideas of child-rearing - "Now, say you're sorry!" - instead of a condition, an existential position over against God. It can be all too easy to reduce the idea of an examination of conscience to a placing of ticks against a long list of dreary transgressions, rather than an embracing of our own reality in the light of God's mercy.

In the Greek of the Philokalia, the word for sinner is not, in the Eastern Orthodox context, chiefly concerned with transgressing one of a list of Naughty Things, but with the sense of failing to be what one might be, of missing the mark.

Sin in the Orthodox Christian understanding is "missing the mark" (the literal meaning of the Greek word for sin, hamartia), falling short of the glorious purpose for which God created mankind. It is also understood as separation from God, since intimate communion with God is the normal state of mankind from which most people have fallen. Sin is imperfection, anything which fails to live up to the fullness of life in Christ for which man was created. 

The Bible sometimes uses legal metaphors to refer to sin, likening it to crime, that is, crime against God's law. For Orthodox Christianity, while making use of legal imagery, the more dominant imagery used for sin is also drawn from Scripture, and that is that sin is a kind of disease, an affliction for which salvation is the cure. 

The Orthodox Wiki

The silence of contemplative prayer, and the inner solitude it necessarily involves, have a way of bringing us to recognise, whether we seek it or not, the imperfection, the brokenness and the hollowness of our human nature apart from God. Mother Mary Clare SLG writes (Encountering the Depths, SLG Press 1981):

On the path of spiritual progress we must not be afraid to feel within ourselves some of the violent passions and fears which we believe prayer can expose to Christ's reconciliation. As Christians we cannot escape the burden of sharing in the sorrows of mankind. This kind of prayer is both costly and a privilege, for as we learn to see our part in the burden of man's sin, something of the prayer of the Christ is re-enacted in us... Listening is a fundamental ingredient of this condition... When we are not attentive listeners it is not only our own personal relationship with God that will be diminished, but even possibly the direct communication between God and another person. Our dissipation of mind, instability and lack of courage to face ourselves, or to be vulnerable to others, frustrates God’s intention that our prayer be a clear pathway to the discernment of the needs of each other. 

The most difficult and decisive part of prayer is acquiring this ability to listen…

And yet, "difficult and decisive" as it may be, this inward listening seems to be very simple; it develops inevitably from the merest faithfulness to a regular contemplative practice. (For me it is the Jesus Prayer, but there are many other options, as a web search will soon reveal - this Wikipedia article is a good place to start.) From this attention comes a repentance that is clear-eyed and healing. God's mercy is above all realistic and without illusion; it is "the Love that moves the sun and the other stars" (Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII) that brings us from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday, and it is the love that will move the stone from the tomb on Easter Morning, a great while before dawn.