I can recall the excitement that I felt every year as a child and even as a teenager as the signs of summer’s end came. Looming ahead was the beginning of a new school year. It never felt like a return to what I had known the year before, but instead I always imagined it as an opportunity for something new. In my teen years, the secret something new that felt exciting was perhaps a “new” me. Of course, that guy never appeared.

In August 1965, I was slated to enter a brand-new school, a combined junior-senior high. So it was the beginning of life as a teenager. It was 1965, and I felt the lure of something “cool.” I remember shopping for school clothes and buying a few things that, in hindsight, would be classified as “mod.” I was reinventing myself in the British manner, I suppose, and of course it didn’t work. And I pray that there are very few pictures remaining from that year in my life.

Hidden within almost every new experience, I think, is the lure of a “new self.” The new self, of course, is wiser than the old one and will not make the same mistakes. The new self starts with an imaginary clean slate with the baggage of the past left behind. The new self presumes a sort of collective amnesia on the part of everyone else.

There are, doubtless, many of these dreams within the heart of every religious convert. I can recall reading the deep frustration expressed by one convert to Orthodoxy that he had seen no evidence of theosis in his life. Well, I daresay he had seen little or no moral improvement as well.

Several years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos and had an opportunity to hear senior Orthodox monastics speak about the Christian life in general and monasticism in particular. I was struck that a common topic emerged in both discussions and teachings. They would say, “We must be true to ourselves.” The monastic who enters the life trying to be somebody other than themselves will not survive. One of the fathers observed that it is increasingly difficult to find good candidates for the monastic life in that most candidates reflect the disordered personalities that are so rife within our cultures.

On a personal level, I was struck by how much of what was shared was like things that I have written myself. When that sort of thing happens, I confess to simply being reassured with the comfort of having gotten something “right.” It was from a monastic that I first heard teaching about the “false self,” so I suppose I should not have been surprised.

The invention and reinvention of the self, much like my childhood fantasies, is delusional. It is a wasted effort in which everything runs in the wrong direction. We can, in truth, never be other than we are; everything else is a façade, a psychological Potemkin village. Those efforts never hold up to examination.

The greater task is the journey towards the true self, that self to whom we must be true. The Elder Sophrony said quite succinctly, “The way up is the way down.” The mindset within our modern culture is one of constant progress, of striving to be something other than what we are. The classical pattern within the Church does just the opposite—it moves towards a deeper and deeper realization of the truth of our being. On the one hand, this is the heart of repentance. Repentance in the modern mind is distorted into just one more model of progressive change. True repentance is not found in being what we are not, but in confessing and confronting what and who we truly are. This is the heart of Sophrony’s other adage: “Teach them to bear a little shame.”

It is with this understanding that in my writings I have challenged the notion of “moral progress.” That concept, when practiced by the modern mind, is simply delusional. It is not that there is no change in our lives, and certainly we are promised transformation in Christ, but it’s rather that the change which occurs is something other than the progressive notions of the modern world. We do not get “better and better.” More accurately, we may become more honest, more truly ourselves, more willing to acknowledge the truth of our lives, more willing to bear our weakness and infirmities. It’s in that truth that the transformation that is ours in Christ can begin.

In the paradoxical life of true Christianity, striving to be better often feeds the darkness of our shame. We become angry at our failures, judgmental of those around us, suspicious of others, anxious, and depressed. The Cross provides the pattern for the Christian life. It is the great counter-intuitive march towards glory, a glory that is crucifixion itself.

The moral and spiritual life, when treated as one more progressive project, is largely marked by constant failure or worse. We cannot teach a corpse to behave like a living human being. Until the inner man is healed, all outward efforts will end in frustration or a false existence. What is required in our life is not new behavior but a new creation.

I’ve often wondered if the continuing moral failures of our life are not something that God allows so that we can get frustrated enough to realize that that path is not the way he has called us. We are not saved by our striving to do better; we’re saved by our willingness to tell the truth about ourselves, and allowing God to do what obviously we ourselves cannot do.

The new creation begins in the very depth of the soul. The journey to that depth is marked by weakness, shame, loneliness, and what will indeed feel like failure. It is the difficult work of bringing into the light what we would often prefer to remain hidden. Christ has not come to improve us, but to remake us from the inside out.

That same work requires safety and emotional support. We do not enter the dark under the threat of punishment. The spiritual work of moral improvement, particularly when it is undertaken with the threat of eternal punishment, yields very little, if any, interior work. In what is often a shaming atmosphere, one dare not approach the depths of greater shame. The result might be marked by certain changes in behavior, but not the sort of healing and transformation that is the hallmark of the saving work of Christ. The many dark deeds done in the name of Christ are the predictable fruit of moralism.

It strikes me as interesting that two of the characters in the Gospel who seem to have something of an instant change in their life: One is the thief on the cross, who clearly and nakedly, his failure and guilt is made manifest for all the world to see, and he doesn’t seek to argue with it or to hide it, but simply to say: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Another is the woman who was taken in the act of adultery, as red-handed as you can get, [dragged] out in the middle of the street, condemned by those of her day under the Mosaic law, in which they were then ready to kill her, to stone her to death—and Jesus intervenes. There’s no moral improvement that she can plead; there’s no saying to her, “Will you try harder?” There is simply Jesus saying, “Go and sin no more.” She has borne her shame in his presence, and she has found, in him, his gift of transformation.

There is a new self in Christ, renewed according to the image of Christ within. It is in no way the product of our own efforts. Every imagination we might have as to the contours of that new self is just that—imagination—and pretty much nothing more.

Gentleness, kindness, and love with deep respect and empathy for the spiritual struggle of others is the required path of a wise shepherd. God has promised to do the work—if we dare to let him. Glory to God.