Fr. Rafail Noica: What is Repentance?
How is repentance expressed? Through the exapostilarion you will hear in Holy Week: "Thy bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior, but I have no garment with which to enter."
Repentance, brothers and sisters, essentially is nothing other than the dynamic upsurge to eternity; it is the dynamic upsurge of eternal life. What do I want to say by dynamic upsurge? This inner flight of a soul that sees something of spiritual realities and longs for them more or less—a fuller or weaker repentance. This is repentance. How is repentance expressed? Through the exapostilarion you will hear in Holy Week: Thy bridal chamber I see adorned, O my Savior, but I have no garment with which to enter. To the degree that I don’t see it, repentance has not begun. But I’ll say it like this, we often are not aware of this “see.” I don’t think there is one of you here who has not seen something of that chamber and adornment. Something in man’s soul is active, because if not you wouldn’t seek, as Christ says, you would not search for Me if you hadn’t found Me, so to a certain extent, all have found Him, and maybe we found Him in baptism when we were baptized as children, who knows when and how or to what degree grace worked in creation’s heart. And it awoke us to a greater or lesser degree. This is repentance. This, when cultivated, like the title “Culture of the Spirit,” this is culture.
Let’s cultivate this dynamic upsurge until it shines within us, sinners as we see ourselves today, because we don’t yet see ourselves. It begins with a vision of our sin, which is difficult to encounter, difficult to bear, that is why it says “keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.” Because God doesn’t show us our sin in order to crush us, to make us despair, to convict us of sin and throw us in hell, but rather to convict us of sin so that we say “Lord, do something.” And He will do it, because the Lord is He Who does it. We must at least cry out, and sometimes we don’t even have the spirit or understanding, but we must say “Lord,” and as the Holy Apostle Paul says, the Spirit will help us with groanings that cannot be uttered.
So, repentance is the degree to which something within us sees or perceives, the eye of the mind sees or perceives, and something longs for something else; a more powerful repentance makes you not desire the daily things, the joys of this world; an even more powerful repentance makes you renounce the things of this world even more, and so on. I won’t get into details now, but there is enough Christian literature that I hope you will understand better, just as I, beginning to understand words more correctly, began to understand Christian literature better as well.
From A conference titled “Crisis in the Church” by Fr. Rafail Noica