Archdeacon John Chryssavgis: When healing can begin

 When I can confess my peculiarity, my brokenness to someone who does not shame me, who will stand as a representative of the community and as a witness before God, then my healing can begin. When I take off the mask and - together with at least one other person - clearly at my vulnerability, then my recovery an restoration has begun. This, of course, is not easy; it is much easier to continue to hide. Repentance is a risk. It can be a painful process, much like bearing a child. In this process the will is not mortified. Rather, it is "buried alive" in a tomb that becomes the womb for new life.

Archdeacon John Chryssavgis, from Soul Mending, Chapter 1, Repentance as Resurrection

Elder Joachim (Nicolaides): Dying in Repentance

 "I am happy," he said to me, "because I die in repentance. I hope the same will happen to you. I am fortunate that God gave me time for repentance."

+Elder Joachim (Nicolaides), Contemporary Ascetics of Mount Athos, Volume 1, by Archimandrite Cherubim

St. Nektarios of Aegina: The nature of true repentance

 

True repentance is a change of mind for one’s actions, an alteration of one’s ethical life, a change toward the better, complete rejection of one’s previous life and sin, steadfast willingness to exercise virtue, complete unification of one’s own will With the Divine Will (i.e. the Divine Law). Therefore, repentance is an ethical rebirth of man and the starting point of a new, virtuous life.

A model for true repentance is given to us by the Prophet Isaiah who incites the Jews to repent and return

to God. This is what he says: “Wash you, be clean; remove your iniquities from your souls before mine eyes; cease from your iniquities; learn to do well; diligently seek judgment, deliver him that is suffering Wrong, plead for the orphan, and obtain justice for the Widow. And come, let us reason together, saith the Lord: and though your sins be as purple, I will make them white as snow; and though they be as scarlet, I will make them white as wool” (Isa. 1:16-18).

+St. Nektarios of Aegina, from Repentance and Confession, chapter 1

St. Mark the Ascetic: Enduring Sorrows which are the result of Sins

 If you wish to bring to God a blameless confession, then do not call to mind the images of previous sins, but courageously endure all the sorrows that come upon you as a result of these sins. Sorrows come as retribution for previous sins, the heaviness of each retribution depending on the heaviness of the sin. He who is wise and knows the truth confesses to God not by calling to mind his committed sins, but by enduring the sorrows that come as a result of those sins. If he rejects suffering and dishonor, he will not bring repentance even if he does other good deeds, for vanity and lack of suffering serve sin, even when the ascetic does good deeds.

+St. Mark the Ascetic, from On Those Who Think they are made Righteous by Works, in The Philokalia Volume 1, #193, 197,150-156

St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: On the Beginning of the Spiritual Life

 Brother! If you have not yet sensed the union of mind, soul, and body, then practice attentive prayer, uniting the prayer of the lips - sometimes spoken, sometimes whispered - with the mind. Act according to the commandments of the Gospel, battling the passions with endurance and long-suffering, never slipping into despair or hopelessness when you are defeated by sinful thoughts or emotions. At the same time, do not allow yourself to be defeated easily. Having fallen down, stand up. If you fall again, stand up again, until you learn how to walk without tripping. The cup of infirmity has its uses; until a proper time, the providence of God allows it, so that the ascetic can be purified of pride, anger, remembrance of evil, condemnation of others, arrogance, and vanity. It is especially important to recognize the action of vanity within yourself and to rein it in. While it acts in you, you will not be able to enter the domain of the spiritual life, for [the] price of entrance is a lack of passionate attachments, which is a gift received after the coming of the peace of Christ.

+St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, from The Refuge: Anchoring the Soul in God, Chapter 16 The Prayer of the Mind, the Heart, and the Soul.

Tertullian of Carthage: Repentance, the Church as Christ

 With one and two individuals, there is the Church; and the Church, indeed, is Christ. Therefore, when you cast yourself at the knees of the brethren, you are dealing with Christ, you are entreating Christ. In the same say, when they shed tears over you, it is Christ who suffers, Christ who implores the Father. When it is a son who asks, the request is always more easily granted. How very grand is the reward of modesty, which the concealing of our sin promises! If in fact we conceal something from the notice of men, shall we at the same time hide it from God? Are, then, the good opinion of men and the knowledge of God to be equated? Is it better to be damned in secret than to be absolved in public? "But it is a miserable thing thus to come to confession!". Yes, evil leads to misery. But where there is repentance misery ceases, because it is thereby turned to salvation.

+Tertullian of Carthage, from Of the Second Baptism, from Ante-Nicene Fathers

St. Maximos the Confessor: To love God is to love every man

 The person who loves God cannot help loving every man as himself, even though he is grieved by the passions of those who are not yet purified. But when they amend their lives, his delight is indescribable and knows no bounds.
+St. Maximos the Confessor, from Four Centuries on Charity, Century 1, #13

Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev): On those who think they have no great sins

 Those who think that they do not have any great sins are actually blind. They must pray to God to enable them to perceive their sins and to save themselves from the extremely fatal spiritual delusion that they do not have any particular sins. Even if their sins are as small as specks of dust, if they are not cleaned with constant Confession, they pile up and dirty the room of the heart so that the high heavenly Guest cannot enter there.

The small sins are often more dangerous than the greatest crimes, because the latter weigh heavily on the conscience and insist on being atoned for, confessed, settled, erased, while the small sins do not weigh too much on the soul, but they have that perilous property of making it insensitive to the grace of God and indifferent to salvation. Fewer people have perished from ferocious wild beasts than have from small microbes, invisible to the naked eye. By being considered insignificant, the small sins are usually passed by without any attention. They are easily forgotten, but they create in man the most terrible habit - the habit of sinning, of dulling his moral consciousness.

+Archimandrite Seraphim (Aleksiev), from The Forgotten Medicine, The Mystery of Repentance, Chapter 4, Objections to Confession

St. Theognostos of Alexandria: The wrath and compassion of God

 We will not be punished or condemned in the age to be because we have sinned, since we were given a mutable and unstable nature. But we will be punished if, after sinning, we do not repent and turn from our evil ways to the Lord; for we have been given the power to repent, as well as the time in which to do so. Only through repentance shall we receive God's mercy, and not its opposite, His passionate anger. Not that God is angry with us: He is angry with evil. Indeed, the divine is beyond passion and vengefulness, though we speak of it as reflecting, like a mirror, our actions and dispositions, giving to each of us whatever we deserve. 

+St. Theognostos of Alexandria¹, from On the Practice of the Virtues, Contemplation and the Priesthood, from The Philokalia, Volume 2.

¹This attribution, by St. Nikodimos, is considered unlikely by scholars.

Fr. John Chryssavgis: God loves us in all our sin

 Man in all his sinfulness is loved by God if he can just keep moving towards God. When one does fall, if one only cries out with confidence, the fall is not into nothingness but into the arms of God stretched open once and for all on the Cross.

+Fr. John Chryssavgis, from Repentance and Confession in the Orthodox Church, Introduction.

Archimandrite Seraphim PapaCostas: The value of Repentance

 The one word repentance, is a term that causes man of our modern society a feeling of discomfort similar to that which a sick man experiences on hearing the name of an unpleasant drug. Nevertheless, in every age and far more in the present deeply uneasy, tired and unsettled age nothing is more useful, more indispensable than repentance. Often man wishes for nothing else more Keenly, even though he has no clear notion of what he really craves.

Man has an ardent desire for repentance, because the finest and noblest words in human literature expressing the highest degree of human happiness and the most valuable gifts which respond to the deepest desires of our souls are rest, peace, love, joy, life, all of which are contained in one somewhat repulsive word and which are promised by the Lord who invites every man to repentance and are given by Him to every true penitent.

+Archimandrite Seraphim PapaCostas, from Repentance, 1.Invitation to Repentance

St. Clement of Rome: All have the opportunity to repent

 Let us turn to every ages that has passed, and learn that, from generation to generation, the Lord has granted a place of repentance to all such as would be converted to Him. Noah preached repentance, and as many as listened to him were saved. (Gen 7; 1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 2:5) Jonah proclaimed destruction to the Ninevites; (Jonah 3) but they, repenting of their sins, propitiated God by prayer and obtained salvation, although they were aliens [to the covenant] of God.

+St. Clement of Rome, from The First Epistle, chapter 6.

St. Peter of Damascus: That one should not despair

 Even if you are not what you should be, you should not despair. It is bad enough that you have sinned; why in addition do you wrong God by regarding Him in your ignorance to be powerless? Is He, who for your sake created the great universe that you behold, incapable of saving your soul? And if you say that this fact, as well as His incarnation, only makes your condemnation worse, then repent; and He will receive your repentance as He accepted that of the prodigal son (cf Luke 15:20) and the prostitute (cf Luke 7:37-50). But if repentance is too much for you, and you sin out of habit even when you do not want to, show humility like the publican (cf Luke 18:13): this is enough to ensure your salvation. For he who sins without repenting, yet does not despair, must of necessity regard himself as the lowest of creatures, and will not dare to judge or censure anyone. Rather, he will marvel at God's compassion, and will be full of gratitude towards his Benefactor, and so may receive many other blessings as well. Even if he subject to the devil in that he sins, yet from fear of God he disobeys the enemy when the latter tries to make him despair. Because of this he has his portion with God, for he is grateful, gives thanks and is patient, fears God, does not judge so that he may not be judged. All these are crucial qualities. It is as St. John Chrysostom says about Gehenna: it is almost of greater benefit to us than the kingdom of heaven, since because of it many may enter the kingdom of heaven, while few enter for the sake of the kingdom itself; and if they do enter it, it is by virtue of God's compassion. Gehenna pursues us with fear, the kingdom embraces us with love, and through them both we are saved by God's grace.

+St. Peter of Damascus, from The Philokalia, Volume 3

St. John Chrysostom: God's surpassing love for mankind

 Such is the love of God for mankind that He never rejects genuine repentance, but even if someone were to go beyond the limit of evil and desired to return from there to the way of virtue, He would receive and approach him, doing everything to guide him to his former condition. In fact, He is still more loving: for even if one did not show all repentance - even the very least - He would reward him much for the little repentance shown.
It is not He who ever turns away from us, but rather we who detach ourselves from Him.
If you have sinned and fallen, rise, arise please. For the good and loving Master who was put to shame by your sin is beside you and does not reject cohabitation with you. Give Him your hand.
+St. John Chrysostom, from Letters to the Fallen Theodore

Fr. John Chryssavgis: Repentance as a Pascha

 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

Archdeacon John Chryssavgis: The nature of repentance

Repentance is a way of on-going transfiguration for which one must struggle continually, in which one's heart and mind continuously receive illumination by the Holy Spirit. It is a continuous pathway, a perennial striving, and all-embracing motion, and not merely an occasional emotion. Though it is a mutual, cooperative endeavor between the human being and God, ultimately repentance, like faith, is a gift, a gift that a person either accepts or rejects. If a person is open to God and desires Him above all else, the Holy Trinity will come to dwell in that person and gradually transform the "heart of stone" into a "heart of flesh".
+Archdeacon John Chryssavgis, from Soul Mending: The Art of Spiritual Direction, Chapter II: Repentance and Confession, The forgotten Mystery.

Papa-Dimitri Gagastathis: Repentance

If after baptism one does not keep the confession of faith and the promises he made, he deserts Christ and joins the devil. Instead of God's child, he becomes a child of the devil, a perjurer, a traitor, a denier of his promises, and the grace of the Holy Spirit departs from him. But even that sinful, ungrateful, unthankful and treacherous man, that follower of Judas, as long as he repents sincerely and truly, like the prodigal son, like the harlot, like the tax collector and the thief, the All-good God receives back with open arms, dresses with the first robe, and counts among His genuine children, as the Fathers teach. St. Gregory the Theologian states: "A drop of tears is equivalent to the bath of Baptism, and a painful cry in repentance brings back the grace of the Holy Spirit which had departed for a while." Similarly, Saint John Chrysostom, amazed at the extent of God's goodness and love for man, exclaims, "O, what a magnitude of love for man! O, what an excess of goodness! God proclaims the sinner righteous once he confesses his sins and resolves to follow Him steadfastly."
+Papa-Dimitri Gagastathis, from Papa-Dimitri Gagastathis, The man of God, Words of spiritual fathers about papa-Dimitri

St. Ieronymos of Aegina: Let us see to it that we repent.

I pray to God not to take my soul until I have time to repent sincerely. Because God desires sincere repentance, not that which is hypocritical and just humble talk. 

Two elders once quarreled and one went to the other to ask forgiveness. But he was not sincere and humble, and did not ask forgiveness from from his heart. The other was discerning; he perceived it and didn't forgive him. The first went to a spiritual father and said to him, "I quarreled with so-and-so and whereas I asked his forgiveness, he won't forgive me. What should I do?" The father answered him, "You didn't ask from your heart, that's why he didn't forgive you." After a little while he went back with sincere repentance and said to him, "I am the one at fault, forgive me." And then he forgave him. So it is with God. He doesn't listen to the words, He looks at the heart. As long as we have time, therefore, let us see to it that we repent.

+St. Ieronymos of Aegina, from The Elder Ieronymos of Aegina by Peter Botsis, chapter 20, Daily Ministry

St. Sophrony (Sakharov): God is humility

Generation and generation of those who have prayed before us - and, indeed, the Holy Scriptures also - have addressed God after His theophany, in respect of His relations to us, His manifestations: God is Light, God is Truth, Love, Mercy, and much else. I would make bold to add: God is humility. Nothing which is unclean - which means proud - can draw near Him. Pride is abomination, the opposite of Divine goodness. Pride is the principle of evil, the root of all tragedy, the sower of enmity, the destroyer of peace, the adversary of divinely-established order. In pride lies the essence of hell.
Pride is the 'outer darkness' where man loses contact with the God of love. "Men loved darkness" (John 3:19). Repentance alone can deliver us from this hell.
+St. Sophrony (Sakharov) from We Shall See Him as He Is, chapter 3, Concerning Repentance.