The Experience of a Miracle: A Story about Confession and Repentance
One of my favorite books comes from the last
years of the Soviet Union. It is the story of Tatiana Goricheva, a member of
the “intelligentsia” and a Soviet-era dissident. Her book, Talking About God Is
Dangerous, offers fascinating insights into both a period of time and the
period of a human soul’s conversion by grace. The little volume is out of print
but can be found on the internet for as little as a dollar. I share a sample as
she tells of her first confession.
***
We knew virtually nothing
…I had
come to make my confession for the first time in my life. Shortly beforehand I
had become a Christian by the grace of God. I had no deeper knowledge either of
Christianity or of the church – who could have taught me? I and my
newly-converted girl friend, both in the same position, learned what to do by
imitating our old women, who zealously preserved the Orthodox faith and
practices. We didn’t know anything. But we had something which in our day
should perhaps be treasured more than knowledge: a boundless trust in the
church, belief in all its words, in every movement and demand. Only yesterday
we had rejected all authority and all norms. Today we understood the
deliverance that we had experienced as a miracle. We regarded our church as the
indubitable, absolute truth, in minor matters just as much as in its main
concern. God has changed us and given us childhood: ‘Unless you become as
children, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.’
I only
knew that it was necessary to go to confession and to communion. I knew that
both confession and communion were high sacraments which reconcile us with God
and even unite us with him, really unite us with him in all fullness, both
physical and spiritual. I was formally baptized by my unbelieving parents as a
child. Whether they did that out of tradition or whether someone had persuaded
them to do it, I never discovered from their explanations. Now at the age of twenty-six
I had decided to renew the grace of baptism.
Like a hardened crust
I knew
that the priest himself – the well-known confessor Father Hermogen – would ask
me questions and guide my confession. Then the day before I read a little
booklet in order to prepare myself for confession, I discovered that I had
transgressed all the commandments of the Old and New Testaments. But quite
independently of that it was clear to me that the while of my life was full of
sins of the most varied kind, of transgressions and unnatural forms of
behavior. They now pursued me and tormented me after my conversion, and lay
like a heavy burden on my soul. How could I have not seen earlier how abhorrent
and stupid, how boring and sterile sin is? From my childhood my eyes had been
blindfolded in some way. I longed to make my confession because I already felt
with my innermost being that I would receive liberation, that the new person
which I had recently discovered within myself would be completely victorious
and drive out the old person. For every moment after my conversion I felt
inwardly healed and renewed, but at the same time it was as though I was
somehow covered with a crust of sin which had grown around me and had become
hard. So I to longed for penance, as if for a wash. And I recalled the
marvellous words of the Psalm which I had recently learned by heart: ‘Purge me
with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.’
The experience of a miracle
And so my
turn came. I went up, and kissed the gospel and the cross. Of course because I
felt dismay and apprehension, I was afraid to say that I was confessing for the
first time. Father Hermogen began by asking,
‘When did
you last fail to go to church? What festivals have you deliberately neglected?’
‘All of
them,’ I replied.
Then
Father Hermogen knew that he was dealing with a new convert. In recent times
new converts have come into the Russian church in large numbers, and they have
to be treated in a different way.
He began
by asking about the most terrible, the ‘greatest’ sins in my life, and I had to
tell him my whole biography: a life based on pride and a quest for praise, on
arrogant contempt for other people. I told him about my drunkenness and my
sexual excesses, my unhappy marriages, the abortions and my inability to love
anyone. I also told him about the next period of my life, my preoccupation with
yoga and my desire for ‘self-fulfillment’, for becoming God, without love and
without penitence. I spoke for a long time, though I also found it difficult.
My shame got in the way and tears took away my breath. At the end I said almost
automatically: ‘I want to suffer for all my sins, and be purged at least a
little from them. Please give me absolution.’
Father
Hermogen listened to me attentively, and hardly interrupted. Then he sighed
deeply and said, ‘Yes, they are grave sins.’
I was
given absolution by the grace of God: very easily, it seemed to me: for the
space of several years I was to say five times a day the prayer ‘Virgin and
Mother of God, rejoice’, each time with a deep prostration to the ground.
This
absolution was a great support to me through all the following years. Our sins
(the life of my newly-converted friend was hardly different from my own)
somehow seemed to us to be so enormous that we found it hard to believe that
they could disappear so simply, with the wave of a priest’s hand. But we had
already had a miraculous experience: from the nothingness of a meaningless
existence bordering on desperation we had come into the Father’s house, into
the church, which for us was paradise. We knew that with God anything is
possible. That helped us to believe that confession did away with sin. And the
starets also said, ‘Don’t think about it again. You have confessed and that is
enough. If you keep thinking about it you are only sinning all over again.’
By Fr.
Stephen Freeman
Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2009/03/27/a-story-of-repentance/
