Mother Siluana: On the difference between regret and repentance
For me, repentance is the cure. How? First of all, when I feel sorry for something - for insulting you, for getting drunk and flunking an exam - underneath this ‘feeling sorry’ there is a hidden pain.
Translated by Grig Gheorghiu
Lord, bless us. Lord, enlighten me. So, about the difference between regret and repentance. Repentance is a cure from God for that terrible disease of our soul called regret. Our fallen soul suffers from many diseases, and regret is one of them, a serious one.
Let’s see: regret. If we start from a synonym: “feeling sorry” - then we find a meaning for regret: it is a feeling. So regret is a feeling (or opinion) produced by the ego, by the ‘old man’, in order to cover up a pain, a natural pain. God gave man, whom He made after His own image, the feeling of the heart and the vision of the mind. The nous sees God’s will, sees God’s truth, receives His revelations, and the heart feels. With this feeling, man also feels the pain of sin. When man does something bad, he feels pain; his soul is sensitive to this. When he doesn’t do God’s will, he feels pain. And when we don’t do God’s will, we commit a sin.
So then every sin has an impact, it is felt by the heart as a pain. The pain feels this pain, and the nous brings to us and shows us God’s will, because it sees His will, and it leads us, it enlightens us on the path away from sin. But since the nous got separated from God, man has been stuck with this feeling of sin, with this pain, and he can’t stand it because he can’t find a remedy for it - because the remedy comes only from God.
Man, who is body and soul, knows God with his mind, with his nous, and he knows the unseen meanings, the ones that are revealed to him; and the nous also knows the created meanings. Creation is God’s love for man (plasticized, as Father Dumitru Staniloae used to say), and man knows through his senses the externals, the created world, and gets to know God through them - that is to say, he knows that God is good, that God is beautiful, loving, that He made everything for me, that everything is love, that everything is God’s love in a plasticized form. And through the nous I know God’s meanings, both the revealed ones, regarding the spiritual life, and the meanings related to what we perceive through our senses.
So man has been made in such a way that his senses directed towards the outside world were perceiving reality, and this perception penetrated him, his feelings, his heart, then these feelings were taken over by the nous, which was bringing meanings directly from God. So we were seeing a tree, and by perceiving the tree we were receiving the meanings and all the tree’s qualities put into the tree by God as a sign of love and as a path for us. By the separation of the nous from God, man’s knowledge became ill. When he sees a tree now, a perception is formed, and the perception penetrates man’s mind. However, the mind is not connected to the heart anymore, it is not in the heart anymore, it is not connected to God anymore, so this perception forms an image which is stored. And man learns that the tree is of type X and has certain qualities, serves some purpose, and slowly he learns more and more about that tree through this method of perceptions that are stored and transformed into images.
Images cause an activity of the mind which gathers these images and works with them. Imagination works with images stored through the senses. And of course, we can combine them in many ways, and in this manner we become creative. These images, this activity proceeds upwards, towards knowledge, and then man’s mind produces an idea, it rates these images as being good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant, useful, and so on - and all these are feelings or opinions.
This is what a feeling or an opinion is: a stage in our knowledge, and the majority of human minds stop at opinions. “This is my opinion” and that’s all there is to it - I publish it, I get a PhD, and I am ready to do anything to defend my opinion. Why? Because it is mine, I created it with my imagination. For other minds, opinions can go further and lead to a rational knowledge, the knowledge of reason, which forms theories that are also based on opinions or feelings.
In this way, man doesn’t know God’s will anymore, because the nous is not connected to God, it is subject to reason, it is enslaved by a reason which searches, analyses, synthesizes and stores all these opinions and theories - such that it gathers an entire wealth which we call knowledge, the result of human knowledge. And we strive to learn this knowledge in school, to reproduce it, to get top grades - and there was a time when this encyclopedic memory was considered very valuable. Nowadays we don’t need it, we run a Google search and we are done.
So, to go back: regret, feeling sorry is the feeling or the opinion of my fallen mind about the evil which I have done. I feel sorry, I am the one who judges, I consider this action evil, and in fact I call it evil: I have done evil. And the feeling that erupts here is a pain, a gnawing - it gnaws at us like the worm that never sleeps. This is regret, which gnaws at us so that we know what evil is, so that we know the distinction between evil and good - or so we tell ourselves.
And so, before the Saviour came, before He called us to repentance, before He gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit and the power of repentance, we lived in regret. Of course there were people even before the Saviour came who received the Holy Spirit - people like the prophets and others who truly repented, that is they stopped living in regret, but instead they called out to God so they could learn to know evil in the true sense of the word.
For me, repentance is the cure. How? First of all, when I feel sorry for something - for insulting you, for getting drunk and flunking an exam - underneath this ‘feeling sorry’ there is a hidden pain. I need to descend there, to turn my mind around (metanoia), to turn my mind around instead of keeping it stuck in regret, stuck in the thoughts that grind my mind because of regret, stuck in the words that I could say - “I am sorry, oh how sorry I am” - and I could even follow these words with “please forgive me”; but it is a forgiveness based on feelings and opinions and not a true request for forgiveness.
And so I need to go deeply into my pain and by going there (with prayer, of course, because repentance is a gift from God) I will discover that I am not sorry, but I am in pain because of the evil I have done to you. It is a pain in my heart - the evil I have done to you hurts, it hurts me, so it manifests itself as a pain. This is the piercing of the heart; this is the broken and contrite heart - and we come step by step closer to this pain, on the condition that we sacrifice all our thoughts and all our feelings related to being sorry and to regret.
When we get closer to this pain, when we reach it, evil acquires a reality which demands to be named - and we somehow receive this name from God. I say “I lied”, but this is a name which encompasses the act of lying, and not only a label attached to the act of lying - which label I then take with me and I go to my spiritual father to confess it. No, this name truly encompasses the pain caused by the lie, and it is necessary for us to immediately add: this evil I have done before you, Lord. Because we do not do evil except by detaching ourselves from God. We tear ourselves apart from God, we detach from Him, but He doesn’t detach from us - He looks at us, He loves us, He follows us all along with His providence and His love. And so all the evil I do, I do before Him.
By going back before Him, going back to the real pain I feel - the pain I feel in my heart for doing this evil - then I become sensitive to the presence of God, and the act of asking for forgiveness appears in my prayer. Asking for forgiveness is a prayer, and it is always accompanied under these circumstances by tears. That pain that I live brings along crying for the sin I committed, because at the exact moment when we live our pain, the Comforter comes to comfort us. This presence of the Comforter, of the Holy Spirit, is the first stage of God’s work in me.
So we live our pain, we name the evil, we are aware of the presence of God and we are accompanied by His presence - what comes next is confession. For repentance to exist, there needs to be confession. So, confession: we go to our spiritual father (to him whom God has invested with the gift of healing us, of healing our wounds with the grace he receives from God) and we confess our sins, we show our pain to God and we mourn it at the feet of His mercy.
And we don’t read the labels, and we don’t confess our regrets, as we often do. From now on the Holy Spirit is going to teach us, by the grace we received after the remission of our sins through confession. When we receive the grace we feel not only relief - and in the first place we actually do not feel relief, but gratefulness and courage and strength to live the terrible pain that we commit sins, that we are still far from God, and that we sin continually. And we become more and more sensitive to the ugliness of sin, and our pain becomes more intense, but at the same time the comfort we feel becomes deeper and deeper.
The fact that we usually feel relief after the Holy Confession means that we have actually only emptied ourselves of regrets, of these feelings, of this worm that gnaws at our conscience - that we are not quite OK. Our ego - for us as Christians, as Orthodox - our ego is in fact happy that it is Orthodox. It says “It’s good that you’re taking away some of my burden, that I get to be washed from time to time.” I go to confession, I wash myself - but of my regrets, of my feeling sorry, and I receive remission for my sins, and I feel better, much better.
That’s why as soon as I sin, I feel the need for someone to free me, to loosen my ties to sin, and then I feel relief. Most often there is no question of turning my mind to this pain which is in my heart when I sin, when I commit evil, and which is the beginning of true repentance. If I don’t bring the grace of God’s forgiveness, the grace of His mercy, into that pain, then I haven’t repented properly, I haven’t confessed properly, and...God have mercy on us, maybe He works in different ways too. But this is how the Holy Fathers teach us.
I pray that these words will be useful, and I thank You, O Lord.