Return To The Way
Taken (with minor adaptations) from ‘Christ the Eternal Tao’ by Hieromonk Damascene
Metanoia
Even if we stray far from the Way and lose all awareness of our spirit, still that spirit longs to fulfil its purpose, and still the wordless Word speaks to it, calling it back to Himself.
This longing and this calling is felt by the soul as an internal conflict, a gnawing, unnamed suffering.
The Way, however, may not only use internal, moral suffering to call us back. He may also work through physical pain, or through emotional pain arising from the loss of a loved one or any other of our earthly attachments.
At that time, we may find this to be terribly and unnecessarily cruel; but later, if we are to look at it objectively, we will se that, considering the seriousness of our previous condition, the Word in fact acted as gently as possible in effecting the cure.
Through suffering we are stopped short in our self worship and pursuit of earthly gratification. We find that our old distractions no longer work as they did before- they no longer stop the pain.
Finally we are forced to face what we had been running from all our lives: we are forced to face ourselves as we really are, and it is a gruesome sight.
The ego cries out that, if we truly face our sickness, the end is at hand; and this is true, for it will mean the end of the ego’s tyranny.
For our true selves, however, it marks the beginning of a new life.
The full wretchedness of our condition is not seen all at once, for our spiritual eyes have only opened partway; but enough of it is seen to make us realise the need to change.
Then begins the slow and painful process of what Christ called “repentance.”
Repentance means much more than regret. In its original Greek form- metanoia- it literally means to change the spirit (nous), to purify the eye of the soul.
Metanoia begins with the realignment of all our powers away from our former loves- for ourselves and for created things- and toward The Way of the universe, the wordless Word from Whom we have been fleeing.
With this offers the return.
We are starving to the death the go or false identity.
Now the spirit is allowed to get out from under the ego and resume its rightful place.
Our human action is the beginning of metanoia; but the completion of it lies in the Divine action of the world-less Word within us.
This occurs in the following way: Now that our spirit has begun to regain mastery, we experience the yearning that is natural to it- the yearning for our Maker.
Along with this comes the yearning for that which separates us from Him to be removed: we yearn to be cleansed from our corruption.
And so the spirit in man calls out- perhaps not with words, perhaps without knowing the name of Him to Whom it calls- and the wordless Word, having come out to meet man’s spirit, responds.
He completes what man has begun in the process of metanoia, for it is He Who renews and purifies man’s spirit though the same Power by which He created it in the first place.
St Paul calls this being “transformed by the renewing of your mind (nous)”.
Christ said it means to “be converted”
We know that our metanoia is genuine- that is, that a Divine change has really occurred in us - when we have a revulsion for what before appeared sweet to us.
In the words of St Isaiah the Solitary: “When a man severs himself from evil, he gains an exact understanding of all the sins he has committed against God; for he does not see his sins unless he severs himself from them with a feeling of revulsion. Those who have reached this level pray to God with tears, and are filled with shame when they recall their evil love of the passions.”
Forgivness
When the purification of the spirit occurs, we experience forgiveness.
We know that we were corrupted, and that we were not capable of purifying ourselves.
Moreover, we sense intuitively that we have corrupted ourselves of our own volition, and hence were not deserving of being purified by some power outside ourselves. And yet, in a manner surpassing nature, we have been cleansed, and so this comes to us as a kind of wondrous mystery.
When we experience this mystery, another mystery occurs. Having felt that we have received forgiveness undeservedly, we not become ready to forgive everyone everything- to shed all the hidden resentments that had separated us from The Way.
These resentments are like chains which bind us to the objects of our bitterness, and now we are free of them.
Thus in forgiving, we are no longer bound to this earth, and are at last free to love the wordless Word Who has forgiven us.
With the coming of The Way, this path is now seen in a personal light, in the form of a Divine-human Person hanging on a Cross.
They ascend the Cross with Him in order to put their false selves to death. They continue to suffer in this world just as He did; but whereas the suffering of their former selves had been suffering without God- and was in fact due to their separation from Him- now their suffering is with Him, and is altogether different, even sweet.
As Fr George Calciu, a priest who endured twenty-two years in communist prisons, points out: “Christ did not come to explain human suffering, or to eliminate it . Rather, He came to fill human suffering with His presence.”
Dying with Christ on the Cross is the beginning of metanoia, but its culmination lies in being resurrected with Him.
Just as Christ arose from the grave with a renewed body (so that even his closest disciples failed to recognise Him), so does our spirit arise in a renews form through metanoia.
“ When a man weeps with his whole being from the pain caused by the knowledge of his evilness, his torment far exceeds any outside suffering, and he seems himself as the worst of men…Prayer in this holy pain can sweep man’s spirit into another world. Everyday life is forgotten and the body no longer makes itself felt. The desert ascetics termed this the hell of repentance that likens us to Christ defending into His hell of love. However acute the Adamitic torment, however profound the suffering, it is accompanied by the joy of the Divine summons and the light of new life.” Archimandrite Sophrony