Repentance is not a self-contained act: it is a passing over, a Pascha from death to life, a continual renewal of that life. It consists of a reversal of what has become the normal pattern of development, which is the movement from life to death. To experience this reversal in repentance is to have tasted of the glory and beauty of God; it is the mark of man's presence before God in the abundance of His mercy and of God's presence before man in the abyss of his weakness: "Set Your compassion over against our iniquities, and the abyss of Your lovingkindness against our transgression."1 It is the awareness of God's beauty that makes one realize the chasm that separates one from His gratuitous grace. The initiative belongs to God, but presupposes man's active acceptance, which is a way of perpetually receiving God within the heart, of God being embodied within man, of divine incarnation. Here God call man, and man responds to God and in doing so gains salvation and life abundant: "sorrow working repentance to salvation not to be repented of"(2 Cor 7:10). In repentance it is man's total limitation and insufficiency that is placed before God, not simply particular wrongdoings or transgressions.
+Fr. John Chryssavgis, from Repentance and Confession in the Orthodox Church, Introduction
1from Vespers of Pentecost, first kneeling prayer
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