The Courage to Begin Again

Repentance as the Continual Turning of the Heart Toward Christ

“If he is a true laborer, he can make a new beginning at every moment.”

— Abba Silouan

Synopsis of Tonight’s Group on The Evergetinos Volume III Hypothesis IX D3 - Hypothesis X A-C1

There is an intensity in the Fathers that can sometimes frighten us.

They speak of vigilance, struggle, examination, tears, watchfulness, and the danger of negligence. St. Synkletike tells of a servant of God who watched the movements of his thoughts so carefully that he knew which appeared first, how long each assault lasted, and whether the struggle had grown stronger or weaker than the day before. Abba Nisthero tells the monk to examine himself morning and evening. Abba Isaiah says simply: consider every day where you have fallen short.

Nothing about this is casual.

The Fathers understood that the heart can grow sleepy. We forget ourselves. We forget God. We become accustomed to movements within us that should trouble us. Resentment settles quietly into the heart. Judgment becomes habitual. Prayer becomes mechanical. Desire scatters itself among a hundred things. We begin tolerating what once would have brought us quickly to repentance.

And so they tell us: pay attention.

Not anxiously.

Not morbidly.

But truthfully.

There is a zeal necessary for the spiritual life because love itself makes demands upon us. The one who desires God cannot become indifferent to what keeps him from God. The one who desires to love cannot simply make peace with everything within himself that prevents love.

Yet there is something crucial here that can easily be missed.

Christian self-examination is never meant to leave us staring at ourselves.

Its movement is relational.

We look within so that we may turn again toward the Other.

Toward Christ.

This changes everything.

Repentance is not primarily the examination of a defective self attempting to repair itself. It is the movement of a wounded person toward the Physician. We look honestly at what we have become because we desire the One into whom we have been baptized.

“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”

This is the deeper measure of the Christian life.

Not merely: Have I behaved well today?

But: What in me still resists the life of Christ into whom I have been baptized? Where have I refused love? Where have I protected myself rather than given myself? Where have fear, anger, vanity, resentment, or self-will obscured His likeness within me?

And then, perhaps most importantly:

Will I allow Him to heal me?

This is why the Fathers can speak with such severity about negligence while being equally severe about despair.

Despair is not humility.

It can masquerade as humility because it speaks incessantly about our failures. But its gaze remains fixed upon the self.

“I have failed.”

“I should be better than this.”

“After all these years, I am still struggling with the same thing.”

“I have ruined everything.”

The Fathers interrupt this monologue.

St. Synkletike gives us the image of the ninety-nine sheep.

One has been lost.

Go find it.

Do not burn down the sheepfold because one sheep wandered away.

Do not abandon the whole life of grace because you discovered something within yourself that still requires healing.

Above all, do not flee from the Master.

That may be the most important line in the entire passage.

Do not flee from the Master.

Our failures often awaken the strange instinct to hide from God. It is as old as Eden. We discover our nakedness and withdraw among the trees. Shame tells us to remain away until we have made ourselves presentable again.

But repentance moves in exactly the opposite direction.

When you fall, turn toward Him.

When you discover anger, turn toward Him.

When prayer has become cold, turn toward Him.

When an old passion you thought long dead suddenly awakens, turn toward Him.

When you discover that after years of prayer you are still capable of pettiness, vanity, impatience, jealousy, or fear, turn toward Him.

Do not flee from the Master.

Because the Master is good.

St. Synkletike says it without qualification: “The Master is good and accepts you whenever you return to Him.”

Here the ascetical struggle reveals its deepest character. We are not struggling to persuade God to give us grace. Grace has already been given. We are not trying to make ourselves worthy of Christ. We have been baptized into Christ. We have been clothed with Him. His life has been given to us freely.

Our struggle is to cease resisting the gift.

This is why examination of conscience should ultimately become an examination of love.

Where today did I refuse the love that was offered to me?

Where did I fail to love the person placed before me?

Where did I choose myself?

Where did I close the heart?

Where did I forget Christ?

And where, perhaps quietly and without noticing it, did grace carry me beyond what I could have done by myself?

Abba Isaiah insists upon this last point. Even when we discover that some passion has weakened, we are not to congratulate ourselves. “Do not trust in yourself; for it was God Who had mercy on you and gave you the power to overcome it.”

Even progress becomes relationship.

Even victory becomes thanksgiving.

Even repentance becomes communion.

There is therefore no contradiction between the extraordinary vigilance of the Fathers and their refusal of despair. Both arise from the same conviction: everything depends upon remaining turned toward God.

Negligence is dangerous because it gradually turns us away.

Despair is dangerous because it tells us that after falling we cannot turn back.

Grace says otherwise.

Abba Moses asks Abba Silouan one of the most beautiful questions preserved in the Gerontikon:

“Can a man make a new beginning every day?”

Silouan’s answer goes further.

“If he is a true laborer, he can make a new beginning at every moment.”

Every moment.

This is the freedom of repentance.

There is no hour in which Christ ceases to be Christ.

There is no failure that makes His mercy less merciful.

There is no moment in which the heart cannot turn.

The spiritual life therefore requires zeal, but it is not the grim zeal of someone attempting to achieve perfection by force. It is the zeal of the lover who does not want anything within himself to remain closed to the Beloved.

We watch the heart because we want the whole heart.

We repent because we want to love fully.

We examine ourselves because there are still places within us that have not learned how to love.

And when we discover them, we need not be astonished.

We need not despair.

We need not flee.

We simply bring them into the presence of Christ.

Perhaps this is what it means to “walk the royal path,” as Abba Benjamin says. We look honestly at the road we have traveled without becoming intoxicated by our progress or crushed by the distance still before us.

We remain attentive.

We remain humble.

We begin again.

And eventually we discover that the deepest question of repentance was never simply, What have I done?

It was:

Toward whom am I turned?

For the Christian life is not finally the perfection of the self.

It is the healing of the person through communion.

We have been baptized into Christ.

We belong to Him.

And every act of repentance, however small, is simply the heart remembering this and turning again toward the One who has never turned away.

The mistake need not become despair.

The wound can become encounter.

The failure can become prayer.

And even now—especially now—we can begin again.

Not because we are strong.

Because the Master is good.