“Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.” (Psalms 19:12). Many of us seem to labor under the impression that when it comes to repentance, just as soon as we can correct all of the obvious bad habits and pet sins, we’ll be pretty much done at that point. But the truth is, the parts of ourselves that we can see clearly as needing to be fixed are only the very tip of the iceberg. We’re complicated creatures. There are a lot of things that we do unconsciously, for good or for ill, and even for patterns of behavior to which we are paying adequate attention to notice, it is not necessarily obvious why we do those things or how we might go about changing them. These are our secret faults. We have to work with the Lord to cleanse out all of the big obvious things first, but once we’ve cleansed all of the non-secret things, then we can get to work on the secret ones. CS Lewis explains this process thusly: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” The more we repent, the more light will be shined on our souls, and the more likely we will be able to perceive our secret faults so that we can cleanse them with the power of the Atonement.
