Even Now, Return

The Holy Prophet Joel and the Mercy Hidden Within Repentance

“Even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart…

Rend your hearts and not your garments.

Return to the Lord your God,

for he is gracious and merciful.”

— Joel 2:12–13

There are two words in the prophecy of Joel that contain almost the whole mystery of repentance.

Even now.

We usually imagine repentance beginning somewhere else.

Earlier.

Before the damage was done. Before the years were lost. Before the habits became deeply rooted. Before we knew enough to understand what we were doing. We look backward and imagine another life that might have been lived if only we had understood sooner, prayed more faithfully, chosen differently, loved more purely.

But God does not meet us in the life that might have been.

He says:

Even now.

This is one of the great discoveries of the desert.

The Fathers knew the human heart too well to place much confidence in spiritual nostalgia. They did not ask the monk to spend his life imagining the person he might have become. They called him to stand before God as the person he actually was.

Abba Moses did not need another past.

St. Mary of Egypt did not need another past.

The thief upon the cross had almost no future.

What remained to each of them was the only place where God can ever be encountered:

the present moment.

Even now.

Perhaps this is why Joel’s words sound so much like the desert:

“Return to me with all your heart.”

Not part of the heart.

Not merely the religious part.

Not the part that knows the prayers, keeps the fasts, reads the Scriptures, venerates the icons, and understands the language of repentance.

The whole heart.

And then comes the terrible and beautiful command:

“Rend your hearts and not your garments.”

The garment can be torn without the heart ever being touched.

There is a repentance that remains almost entirely external. We can accuse ourselves severely. We can enumerate our failures. We can become preoccupied with our unworthiness. We can multiply prayers and disciplines. We can even mistake anxiety before God for humility.

And still the heart remains defended.

The Fathers understood this danger.

They did not seek remorse for its own sake. They sought metanoia: the turning of the whole person toward God. Their fasting, vigils, tears, silence, prostrations, and prayer were never meant to become religious accomplishments. They were ways of allowing the hardened heart to become flesh again.

This is why the tears of the saints are so different from despair.

Despair looks at the self and cannot escape what it sees.

Repentance looks toward God.

And when the heart finally looks toward God, it discovers what Joel places immediately beside his summons to repentance:

“He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”

We sometimes reverse the order.

We imagine that if we repent sufficiently, God will become merciful.

If we grieve enough.

If we confess correctly.

If we punish ourselves sufficiently.

If we finally become the person we should have been.

Then perhaps God will receive us.

But Joel tells us something altogether different.

We return because He is merciful.

Mercy is not the reward of repentance.

Mercy is the ground beneath it.

St. Isaac the Syrian understood this with extraordinary clarity. The deeper a person enters the knowledge of God, the less repentance resembles terror before an offended sovereign and the more it becomes astonishment before incomprehensible love.

The heart breaks because it discovers mercy.

And this changes the meaning of tears.

There are tears born from fear.

There are tears born from shame.

There are tears born from disappointment in ourselves.

But there are also tears that come when a person suddenly realizes that God has never ceased waiting for him.

Those tears heal.

St. Silouan knew this same mystery. He could descend into the deepest knowledge of his own brokenness without surrendering to despair because the descent did not end with himself.

At the bottom was Christ.

“Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.”

The first half without the second becomes destruction.

The second without the first becomes sentimentality.

Together they form the narrow path of repentance.

See everything.

Hide nothing.

And despair of nothing.

There is another image in Joel that reveals what happens when this repentance matures.

“Let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep between the vestibule and the altar, and let them say, ‘Spare thy people, O Lord.’”

The priest is not pictured standing above the people explaining why they have failed.

He is weeping.

He stands between the people and the altar carrying their suffering before God.

“Spare thy people.”

This too belongs to the grammar of the desert.

The closer a person comes to God, the less interested he becomes in standing apart from sinners.

The saints descend.

They bear.

They intercede.

They discover their own wounds in the wounds of others.

Perhaps this is why St. Isaac could speak of the merciful heart burning for the whole creation. Once repentance reaches the heart, condemnation becomes increasingly difficult. The person who discovers how patiently God has borne with him begins to look differently upon everyone else.

Repentance becomes mercy.

And mercy becomes a way of seeing.

Perhaps after many years of the spiritual life we discover that repentance is much simpler than we imagined.

It is not becoming fascinated with our sins.

It is not constructing a better version of ourselves.

It is not endlessly examining the road behind us.

It is turning toward Someone.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Until turning toward Him becomes the deepest movement of the heart.

The Jesus Prayer teaches us this quietly.

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”

There is no argument in those words.

No explanation.

No defense.

No spiritual autobiography.

Only the Name.

The need.

And mercy.

Eventually even our repentance becomes simple.

We stand before God with empty hands.

And perhaps for the first time we understand that empty hands were all He ever asked of us.

The years may indeed have passed.

Some things cannot be repaired.

Some possibilities will never return.

Some roads have closed behind us.

There may be consequences we must carry until death.

Joel does not deny any of this.

He simply places another word into the midst of it:

Even now.

Even now, return.

Even now, the heart can open.

Even now, mercy is nearer than we imagined.

Even now, beneath everything that has been lost, Christ remains.

The garment was never the thing He desired.

It was always the heart.

And the heart, however wounded, however late the hour, however long the wandering, can still turn toward Him.

Even now.