On Repentance
From the Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus
Repentance is the renewal of baptism.
Repentance is a contract with God for a second life. A penitent is a buyer of humility.
Repentance is constant distrust of bodily comfort...
Repentance is the daughter of hope and the renunciation of despair ....
Repentance is reconciliation with the Lord by the practice of good deeds contrary to the sins.
Repentance is purification of conscience.
Repentance is the voluntary endurance of all afflictions...
Do
not be surprised that you fall every day; do not give up, but stand your
around
courageously. And assuredly the angel who guards you will honor your
patience,
While a wound is still fresh and warm it is easy to heal, but old,
neglected and
festering ones are hard to cure, and require for their care much
treatment,
cutting, plastering and cauterization. Many from long neglect become
incurable.
But with God all things are possible...
We
must carefully consider whether our conscience has ceased to accuse us,
not as a
result of purity, but because it is immersed in evil. A sign of
deliverance from
our falls is the continual acknowledgment of our indebtedness.
Nothing
equals or excels God's mercies. Therefore he who despairs is committing
suicide.
A sign of true repentance is the acknowledgment that we deserve all the
troubles, visible and invisible, that come to us, and even greater ones.
Moses,
after seeing God in the bush, returned again to Egypt, that is, to
darkness and
to the brick-making of Pharoah, symbolical of the spiritual Pharoah. But
he went
back again to the bush, and not only to the bush but also up the
mountain.
Whoever has known contemplation will never despair of himself. Job
became a
beggar, but he became twice as rich again.
The
forgetting of wrongs is a sign of true repentance. But he who dwells on
them and
thinks that he is repenting is like a man who thinks he is running while
he is
really asleep...
Quotations from "The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus" translated by Archimandrite Lazarus
Moore; Eastern Orthodox Books, 1973 |
