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LENT III, Year C: March 7 2010

We are creatures of time. When we pray this part of our penitence, we accept that there is an intimate connection between our past actions and our present selves. We also accept that both past and present have an urgent bearing on how we will shape our futures.

There's another connection which this prayer marks out as we pray it: between who we are and what we do. We don't pray 'forgive what we have done' but 'forgive what we have been'. We amend 'what we are'; we ask that our God will direct 'what we shall be'. This is not just a localised repentance for particular acts, important though that is. We recognise that what we do and what we are are deeply inter-dependent. Not that a single act of negligence or cruelty makes us forever negligent or cruel; our natures, fallen though they are, will not take on the colouring of single acts immediately or absolutely thoroughly. But single acts change us, all the same — for good and for evil — and they are habit-forming, very quickly too. If a single cigarette does not make you a smoker it does make the next cigarette more likely. Stealing someone's loose change does not make you an habitual thief instantly; but it opens up the possibility of doing it again. Anger becomes easier with practice; so does sloth. And so it is with virtues too; kindness, patience and gentleness all improve upon repetition and begin with a single act, a single moment of a the will with God's loving purposes and putting the immediate greedy demands of the self aside.

Rowan Williams once remarked, of the memory, that it was 'what the past is doing now' (Resurrection). Memory is so powerful a marker of 'who we are' that you could extend that idea and think of the whole of our present selves as 'what the past is doing now'. It is not a complete truth — by the grace of God we are more than just a collection of our own memories — but it is a formidable part of what we contend with when we brings ourselves to the act of penitence, when we 'repent', turn around, face God and change. It is the reason that repentance is not easy. If I am someone who is in the habit of reproaching my nearest and dearest it becomes part of me to do that — however much I have a nice idea of myself as particularly easy-going. I will have become someone for whom the habit of reproach is ingrained, has made a groove in my character deep enough to be a defining mark. The very word 'character' is from a Greek original, carazo, meaning to engrave, or to make a deep impression. When the Passion, death and resurrection of our Lord 'wiped out the handwriting' [16th Century trans] that was against us by nailing it to His cross (Coloss 2:13–14) He cancelled an indictment against us that we wrote ourselves, our own habits of mind and being wearing a groove from which we could not, by our own strength, escape. For those of us whose generation played LPs, the idea of being 'stuck in a groove' is very vivid, an aural Groundhog Day where the same phrase gets reiterated over and over and the shape of the new sound is prevented because of the damage done to the material on which the tune of our lives is laid down. Much of sin is being stuck in the groove; and hellish relationships rehearse their bitternesses over and over with great faithfulness.

For as well as being creatures of time we are also creatures of habit. And the grip of sin deepens habit into slavery, until we 'do what we would not'; until even against our inclination we repeat the mistakes of the past until they define the present and overshadow the future. Some of them are acts of sin. Others are habits of mind, ready to deepen from eccentricities to the raw matter of despair. They are the components of death, closing off possibility and stunting growth. They are temptations which assail every human being born into the world, and every human being is vulnerable to them, just as every human being is mortal.

But our God is a God of mercy, and He brings with Him life in all its abundance. In the gift of His Son, we encounter a human being for whom those temptations do not translate into the habits of mind which enslave or diminish the self. The passage from Isaiah we heard as our first reading gives a metaphor for the impossible nature of God's gift of Himself: a gift without strings: 'you that have no money, come, buy and eat!' We have nothing to exchange; but our God has an abundance He wishes to give. Nothing could be more different from the inevitable set of consequences which follow from the deepening of a sinful habit of being — indulgences for which we will pay higher and higher prices until we sell ourselves for the sake of 'that which is not bread [...] and that which does not satisfy'.

God in His mercy calls us towards this radical alternative. 'Let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts' as it is put in Isaiah. That kind of turn, the turn of repentance, is not an easy one, because it involves altering who you have become. And who you have become, as our prayer of penitence realises, has its roots so deeply in the past that it threatens to determine the future. Have you ever tried changing your thoughts? It is not simple to do. But the Lord offers us the grace, and the strength, for that change. It will go on having difficulties. We will always fall down and have to start again. But with God's help, we can be turned from death to life, from 'that which does not satisfy' to the water of life, which quenches our deepest drought.

So when we pray this part of the prayer of penitence, we are bringing our whole selves before God. We give up to Him the past selves we have been, with all their grooves and marks and circles of habit, those selves folded in upon themselves [Luther's homo incurvatus in se] which bear the marks of self-regard and so of slavery. And we ask His forgiveness 'because His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts than our thoughts'. 'In your mercy, forgive what we have been'.

And we bring to Him the fulcrum of what we are, the moment of decision, of turning, which implores His grace. 'Help us to amend what we are.'

And we give into His hands the future selves, unshadowed by the past and unmarked by the present, fully His to do as He wills with. 'Direct what we shall be'. And if it is terrifying to relinquish control of our future selves in abandoning past patterns, it is also absolute liberation, the freedom the soul desires. If we dare, we can become the people our Creator intended us to be. But for it, we need to turn towards the mercy of God, and we need to let Him detach us from the selves we know too well, so that 'we may do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with you, our God.'

But that is a story for another week.