Penitence and Repentance: A Lenten Primer

From a very good Lenten reflection by Fr. Michael Sweeney, OP, president of Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, Calfornia, delivered (I'm fairly certain) to seminarians at the start of Lent:

The season of Lent is a penitential season. But what is "penitence"? The etymology of the word is instructive: it derives from the Latin paenitentia, or "repentance", which in turn derives from the word paenitere, "to cause or feel regret" which likely derives from the word, paene, "almost." In this light, paenitentia, our repentance, stems from our acknowledgment of the fact that life is "almost" right, "almost" enough, that we regret the fact that "almost" is not enough and that we know ourselves to be complicit in the fact. The purpose of our repentance is to be restored to a fullness whereby we are able to face life without regret; we are to eliminate the "almost."

"Repentance" makes little sense to many of our contemporaries in that they have no expectation that life should be other than the all-too-partial satisfaction that they experience; life, after all, is regarded a series of compromises. In fact, to be a Christian in the 21st century is, immediately, to be confronted by two wildly different, even contradictory, accounts of what it is to be human: the testimony of the Church, according to which repentance makes sense, and what we might call "the testimony of the world" according to which repentance makes no sense at all.

And:

Who, we might wonder, would not prefer the testimony of the Church?  Yet there are many who find it an abomination.  There are three things that our age cannot forgive the Church: that it insists upon judging the human situation and therefore offends against tolerance; that it insists upon the value of suffering, and therefore offends against morality; that it insists upon a divine dignity for man and woman, and therefore offends against the freedom to be fully invested in the world. 

I suggested at the outset that, to the degree that we discern a need to repent, we do so because everything is not full, that some things are almost but not quite right with us.  But if we were fully to accept who we are in the Lord's sight, then surely life would be full, surely we could eliminate the "almost".  Can it be that we are ourselves complicit in a testimony about life that is not of the faith?

We should likely acknowledge that, at least in some respects, our actual experience better supports the testimony of the world than it does the testimony of the faith.  It would seem that evil can befall us –we can lose our jobs, be abandoned or betrayed by those who, we thought, loved us, suffer the death of a loved one, the absence of a friend – and what about the toothache?  When we consider our actual circumstances, our lives do not appear to be so very different than those of others, our own uniqueness and our vocation can be obscure to us, and are not tolerance, the alleviation of suffering and accommodation to the world prudent in a pluralistic society?  How can we reconcile the testimony of the faith with our life in the world?

Read the entire address, "Lenten Reflection: Unless You Become Like Children".