They are many today, who desire a better understanding of the liturgical tradition of the Church and a more conscious participation in her life.
Repentance, we are told, is the beginning and the condition of a truly Christian life. Christ’s first word when He began to preach was: “Repent!” (Matt. 4:17). But what is repentance? In the rush of our daily life, we have no time to think about it, and we simply assume that all we have to do during Lent is abstain from certain foods, cut down on “entertainment,” go to Confession, be absolved by the priest, receive (once in the whole year!) Holy Communion, and then consider ourselves perfectly “in order” till next year. There must be a reason, however, why the Church has set apart seven weeks as a special time for repentance and why she calls us to a long and sustained spiritual effort. All this certainly must concern me, my faith, my life, my membership in the Church. Is it not then my first duty to try to understand the teaching of my Church about Lent, to try to be an Orthodox Christian not in name only but in life itself?
To the questions: What is repentance? Why do we need it? How are we to practice it?—Great Lent gives the answer. It is indeed a school of repentance to which every Christian must go every year in order to deepen his faith, to re-evaluate, and, if possible, to change his life. It is a wonderful pilgrimage to the very sources of Orthodox faith—a rediscovery of the Orthodox way of life. It is through the forms and the spirit of her Lenten worship that the Church conveys to us the meaning of this unique season. In this world nothing is as beautiful and deep, as inspired and inspiring, as that which the Church, our Mother, reveals and freely gives to us once we enter the blessed season of the “Lenten spring.”
In the early Church, the main purpose of Lent was to prepare the “catechumen,” i.e., the newly converted Christian, for baptism which at that time was performed during the Paschal liturgy. But even when the Church rarely baptized adults and the institution of the catechumenate disappeared, the basic meaning of Lent remained the same. For even though we are baptized, what we constantly lose and betray is precisely that which we received at Baptism. Therefore Easter is our return every year to our own Baptism, whereas Lent is our preparation for that return— the slow and sustained effort to perform, at the end, our own “passage” or “pascha” into the new life in Christ. If Lenten worship preserves even today its catechetical and baptismal character, it is not as “archeological” remains of the past, but as something valid and essential for us. For each year Lent and Easter are, once again, the rediscovery and the recovery by us of what we were made through our own baptismal death and resurrection.
A journey, a pilgrimage! Yet, as we begin it, as we make the first step into the “bright sadness” of Lent, we see—far, far away—the destination. It is the joy of Easter; it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom. And it is this vision, the foretaste of Easter that makes Lent’s sadness bright and our Lenten effort a “spiritual spring.” The night may be dark and long, but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon.
“Do not deprive us of our expectation, O Lover of man!”
~Adapted from Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent
