When it comes to repentance, to be blunt - I can’t.
C.S. Lewis gives the best explanation of my fundamental problem,
“It needs a good person to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it.”
I literally am not capable of repenting. Not on my own.
It takes humility to admit that I cannot do it on my own. But it is in that humility that I open the door to the help that I cannot do without.
As St. James puts it in today’s first reading, “God resiststhe proud but gives grace to the humble.”
Yet even humility will not let me do it on my own. Humility merely makes it possible to receive the help that I cannot do without. Again, from C.S. Lewis,
“Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak.
He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another.
When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them.
We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.”
And so it is with repentance. God must lend me a little of Himself.
I am able to repent because God humbles Himself to hold my hand while I do it.
This is the summons of Lent.
This is the road to repentance.
It begins here. It begins in humility. And it begins now.
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