Tuesday, August 28, 2019 – Canton, Ohio
“Real transformation is the opposite of self-improvement”
Johann Christoph Arnold
So, what is “real” as opposed to “unreal” repentance? (Notice I said “unreal” rather than “false” or “fake,” since the unreality of our own repentance is often unknown to us, and I do not mean to imply bad faith or hypocrisy here.) I don’t think it’s a matter of being honest or genuine, although these are necessary elements of repentance, to be sure. I think it is a matter of the outcome. Real repentance leads one to conversion, at the very least, both a complete turning over of our will and lives to God both as a result of making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves (see Steps 3 and 4 of Alcoholics Anonymous), and of allowing God to re-create us.
For the Christian there is more involved in real repentance than getting off the wrong path and entering upon the right one. As Johann Christoph Arnold puts it in his book, Escape Routes, it is a matter of transformation, not just personal adjustment: “Real transformation is the opposite of self-improvement,” (p. 89). He contrasts these by comparing them to painting a wall, rather than fixing its structural defects, and says that our generation has been seduced into “spend[ing] the greater part of our lives repainting ourselves,” (p. 89): losing a little weight, getting in shape, taking a course or two, essentially puttering around the edges of our personalities as if we were almost perfect and just needed a little tweaking to achieve perfection.
Our Byzantine tradition takes the process further than mere moral conversion. As long as there is a shred of self-love (in the sense of ego, not of healthy self-esteem) in us, we remain like a lump of clay that has not yet been placed on the potter’s wheel. God can only do so much with a lump of clay—make us more human, more like Adam and Eve, perhaps—but we remain otherwise rather shapeless. However if we empty ourselves and let God pick us up and put us on His wheel, we can be certain of being whirled about in a dizzying process of shaping at God’s hands, only to be put into the fiery kiln and baked into something resembling God, into a person who looks and sounds and acts like Jesus Christ himself. When we are living a life of Christ-like love, then it is that we will have become perfect. Only we won’t know it at all, because we will have ceased looking at ourselves—even our sinfulness and frailty—in order to feast our eye on the One who has transformed us, who has, as poet John Donne put it, “ravished” us.