from Olivier Clement's On Human Being:

**


When God banished humankind from the Tree of Life, it was so that they should not go into eternity while in a state of separation. If they had been thrust just as they stood into the divine Light, that state (which we also share) could have been nothing other than hell, hell beyond recall. How often have we offended the steady gaze of an innocent child by our lying and our depravity? The merest instant of love betrayed, of confidence ridiculed, if only we could see it with the perfect clarity of God's vision, would be revealed as an eternity in hell.

**

Clement quotes Denys the Aeropagite: "The libertine is deprived of good by his irrational lust; we can say that the privation annihilates him in some way, also that his lust has no real object. Nevertheless, because there remains in him a faint echo of commununion and friendship, he still shares in the Good. In the same way, anger shares in the Good by its intrinsic desire to bring about an improvement in something it sees as bad. Even one who desires the worst possible life, since it is a desire for life, and a life which seems the best, by the mere desire to live, by reaching out towards life, that person has some part in the Good."

**


Metanoia, the complete turning round in a person's heart of hearts, is not an attempt to achieve some superficial mental improvement by an effort of will, to overcome some fault or vice. It is first and foremost the utter trusting in Christ who gives himself up to death, hell, and separation for us, for me; to the death which I have caused, to the hell which I create and in which I make others and myself live, to the separation which is my condition and my sin. By enduring them, he has made death, hell and torment the door of repentance and new life. Then we discover something we never dared hope for, that our hellish autonomy has been breached by sin, death, and despair, that these have opened to us the mercy of the living God. Then the heart of stone becomes a heart of flesh, the stone which sealed the fountain of life in our heart is shattered; then gush forth the tears of repentance and wonderment, washing us in the waters of baptism, the great waters sanctified by Christ in the beginning; in which we are purified and recreated by the Spirit...


What is required of us above all is an entreaty, a cry of trust and love de profundis, from the depths of our heart. For a moment we must lose our balance, must see in a flash of clarity the meaninglessness of suffering, the ripping apart of our protective covering of happiness or moral virtue...In the Gospel the very root of sin is the pretence that we can save ourselves by our own effort, that we can find security in ourselves and one another...To save ourselves we must give up all security; any notion of being self-sufficient; we must look at the world with wonder, gratefully receiving it anew, with its mysterious promise of the infinite. Everything--the world, history, other people and myself--can be a source of revelation, because through everything we can discern, like a watermark, the face of the Risen Christ, the Friend who secretly shares with us the bread of affliction and the wine of mirth. To this paradox, that the Inaccessible has allowed himself to be crucified for us to reveal that 'God is love,' our only response can be one of humility and trust, tearing ourselves away from all that holds us back, in our desire to worship, even in the midst of our suffering...

**

St. John Climacus says, "To define repentance as the awareness of individual guilt is to risk emptying it of meaning"...Again, to define sin as mere individual guilt would be to do without God, since all we should have to do in order to quieten our conscience would be to keep the law. But, as St. Paul reminds us, the law cannot 'make alive.' We who are reminded every day of our death, that is of the daily murder of love, know that only the victory of CHrist over death and hell can 'make alive.'

**