Complete Preparation for the Sacraments of Repentance and Communion. The Feelings Necessary in a Penitent. A Helpful Reminder About the Blessed Theodora and Her Journey Through the Toll-houses

So what use should you make of the self-knowledge you have gained? First of all, you must judge yourself for all your faults, without any excuses or justifications. When at the Liturgy of the Presanctified, after “Let my prayer arise,” they sing: “Incline not my heart to words of wickedness, to make excuse for sins”—there the faithful are being called to pray that God would not permit them, with wily cunning, to devise excuses for their sins. Whoever devises such excuses, do not expect repentance from them; and without repentance, one will not undertake self-correction. Everything therefore depends on condemning oneself without pity, on bringing oneself to the point where the heart sincerely declares: “I am guilty on every side.”

When the heart says, “I am guilty,” one must add to this the fear of God’s judgment. If your conscience condemns you, God too will not acquit you. God sees you as guilty. If He sees you so, He also condemns you. If He condemns you, He also pronounces and decrees a deserved punishment. Sooner or later this punishment will fall upon you; and it already hangs over you when you have been condemned by God.

What then is to be done? And one would not know what to do, were it not for the mercy of God. The merciful God gives us the hope of forgiveness of our guilt, if we repent with contrition and form a firm intention to avoid our former sins and not to offend God with them again. This is the essence of repentance.

So do not be a cold, detached observer of your faults—grieve over them and sincerely regret that they were allowed to occur. Contrition gives birth to humble resolution to avoid faults, while mere knowledge, though it may be accompanied by an intention to be more careful, will lead to pride—from which may the Lord deliver you!

Having resolved to avoid your faults, you must now think through and determine how to succeed in this, so that from this very moment you may begin actual self-correction. If, for example, you became angry over something—resolve not to get angry anymore, and determine how best to train yourself so as not to get angry. Do the same with everything else: determine right now, in advance, how you will act in each situation so as not to prove at fault again. To make this easier, write down your faults as you come to recognize them, and right alongside them write down how you intend to correct yourself. This will be your first general and fully thorough confession. Take the trouble, for God’s sake, to do this. You will see what power you will then have over yourself, and how powerfully you will begin to keep yourself in hand, with a clear sense of which way of acting is proper and which is not.

While grieving over your sins and forming the intention not to sin, you must also join to this earnest prayer to the Lord that He would grant His help in resisting sin, and believe that the Lord will not withhold such help. Christians must hold deep in their hearts the conviction that just as their sins—over which they grieve, which they confess with a promise to avoid them—are forgiven them by the merciful Lord through the power of His death on the cross, so at the same time God’s grace is also given, by virtue of that same death on the cross, for the avoidance of sin. This grace descends upon firm resolution not to sin, and upon unwavering, luminous faith in Christ the Savior.

When you have done all this—you will be ready for confession, and when after confession you receive absolution from your sins, you will be ready for Holy Communion as well. Upon your sincere repentance and firm resolve to live rightly, the Lord will come to you in His Holy Mysteries and will dwell in you, and will be in you, and you will be in Him. O what great and unspeakable mercy of the All-gracious God!

Something has just come to mind that I want to suggest to you! Obtain the Menaion for the month of March and read there the account of the blessed Theodora and how she passed through the aerial toll-houses. It is found in the Life of Basil the New, under March 26. The life of the elder himself is lengthy. Go directly to Theodora’s account; where it begins you can find by the marginal notes.

The life of the elder is, briefly, as follows. Basil the New first lived in the wilderness not far from Constantinople; then he was seized as a spy and, after enduring many tortures, was finally thrown into the sea. God miraculously preserved him from drowning, and he came secretly into the city, where a certain kind person gave him shelter. The elder resumed his ascetic labors there, just as he had done in the wilderness, with Theodora serving him devoutly. This elderly woman died before the elder himself. Basil also had a disciple named Gregory, a layman, who was very God-fearing. He wished to know what reward Theodora had received for her devoted service to holy Basil. He asked the elder about this. The elder prayed, and Gregory saw Theodora in a dream—in paradise, in a place prepared for Basil, radiant and exceeding bright. Gregory then asked her how she had parted from the body and how she had reached that blessed place. In reply, the blessed Theodora told him the story of how she died and how she passed through the toll-houses. It is precisely this account that I urge you to read with attention. It is very instructive. It guides one toward self-knowledge, and will instill in you even more deeply the conviction of the power of tearful repentance and confession.

While you are obtaining the book, I will tell you something of its contents.

The holy Theodora passed through twenty toll-houses. The first is where the sins of human words and speech are examined—idle talk, foolish and obscene words, disorderly speech: mockery, buffoonery, worldly shameless songs, raucous outcries, laughter, and guffawing. The second is the toll-house of falsehood, where every lying word is examined, and above all perjury, taking the name of God in vain, false witness, failure to fulfill vows made to God, insincere confession of sins, and other such deceits. The third is the toll-house of condemnation and slander—defaming one’s neighbor, mocking their faults and sins. The fourth is the toll-house of gluttony, love of pleasure, excess, feasting and reveling, drunkenness, and breaking of fasts. The fifth is sloth, where the days and hours spent in idleness are examined—idlers, hired workers who do not work according to the wage they accepted, those who are negligent in attending church services on Sundays and feast days, those who grow weary during Matins and the Liturgy, and those who neglect the things that pertain to the salvation of the soul. The sixth is theft of various kinds. The seventh is avarice and miserliness. The eighth is usury and all forms of dishonest gain. The ninth is injustice, where unjust judges are examined—those who judge for bribes, who acquit the guilty and condemn the innocent, who withhold the wages of hired workers, who use false weights and measures in buying and selling. The tenth is envy, hatred, brotherly hatred, and lack of love for one’s neighbor. The eleventh is pride, vainglory, self-conceit, arrogance, haughtiness, failure to honor parents, and disobedience to authority. The twelfth is anger and rage. The thirteenth is malice—harboring ill will toward one’s neighbor, vengefulness, and repaying evil for evil. The fourteenth is murder, where not only robbery is examined, but every wound, striking someone on the head or shoulders out of spite, a slap on the cheek, pushing someone in anger. The fifteenth is sorcery, enchantment, poisoning, whisperings, and the invocation of demons. The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth deal with sins of the flesh. The nineteenth is heresies—wrong-thinking about the faith, apostasy from Orthodoxy, blasphemy against God and all things holy. The twentieth is mercilessness, hard-heartedness, and closing one’s heart to the needs of those in distress.

What the blessed Theodora encountered, every soul encounters. The Apostle called the demons the powers of the air. Will these evil and importunate spirits let any soul pass—when it must rise to the throne of God—without attempting, if not to seize it, then at least to trouble it with their terrors? What, then, is one to do? To our great comfort, tears of repentance combined with works of penitence—and especially with almsgiving—blot out all sins. How many times did the blessed Theodora see the demons bring their scrolls on which her sins were recorded, unroll them to accuse her, and find nothing written there! The angels who accompanied her explained to her, when she asked them the reason for this, that whoever sincerely repents of his sins, fasts, prays, and gives alms—his sins are blotted out.

Do not be clever about this—take this account to heart and act according to its guidance with regard to all your own failings.