Contrition does not paralyze the Christian, nor does it deprive him of fortitude. In his act of penitence he will contemplate, not so much his own weakness as the merciful arms of God that are extended to receive him into His holiness, and the force that rises in him once he throws himself into the arms of God. He knows contrition to be the necessary precondition to any purification and sanctification, seeing that any resolve not born of the pain of contrition is condemned to shallowness and sterility because it is not rooted in the ultimate depths of the soul nor conceived out of an ultimate surrender to God. Contrition alone may thus melt our hearts so as to enable us to receive and preserve the imprint of a basic new orientation towards God.

The true Christian says with David, “A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit: a contrite and humbled heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 50:19). From contrition thus experienced there will arise in him the genuine and heroic determination to become a new man. That kind of contrition alone enables him again to anchor himself in God. It is against the background of his weakness and wretchedness that he forms the resolution, cleansed of all illusions and conceived in holy sobriety, never again to separate himself from God, that he assumes the holy courage to put off, with God’s help, the old man, and to put on the new man in Christ.

“Lord God, King of heaven and earth: deign to guide and to sanctify, to direct and to govern today our hearts and our bodies, our thoughts, our words and our works according to Thy law and in fulfillment of Thy mandates: so that with Thy help we become saved and free, here and in eternity, Savior of the world” (Prayer from the Prime of the Breviary).

Contrition is a form of radical self-surrender

The aspect which is entirely specific to true penitence is that of radical self-surrender. Pride and obduracy melt away. The natural tendency to self-assertion which is otherwise so firmly fixed in our nature—and which makes us reluctant to admit a wrong we have done or to ask a person whom we have wronged to forgive us—is renounced by the penitent. He surrenders himself in humble charity. The tight impermeability of his soul toward God and his fellow creatures disappears. The spasm of dogmatic obstinacy, forcing him always to defend his position, is relaxed. He assumes a state of mind receptive to the Good in all its forms; he divests himself of all self-preservation to the point of full defenselessness.

Contrition awakens our soul in its depths

But to that moral process in breadth, as it were, corresponds a no less decisive one in depth. Contrition arouses us from the sleep of unspiritual existence, from what might be called a mere living away. It awakens us to a keen consciousness of the things that ultimately matter: the metaphysical situation of man, considered in its full gravity; our status under God’s law, and our character as confronted with Him; the task and the responsibility imposed on us by God; the importance of our earthly life for our eternal destiny. Contrition causes us to withdraw from our peripheral interests and to concentrate on the depths. It is in contrition that we respond to the infinite holiness of our absolute Lord, the eternal Judge, whose judgment we cannot evade; and on the other hand, to our own sinfulness.