Great Lent is about to Begin

If you are new to this blog, you should know that I use it as a public journal of my experiences during Great Lent. I do it because I am weak, and without some kind of public accountability I will find all sorts of reasons to be spiritually lazy.

Great Lent begins on March 2 (or March 1, depending on how you are keeping time). In Orthodoxy, if we are going to do anything, we are going to overdo it! So just as Great Lent prepares us for Pascha, a lot of what happens this month prepares us for Great Lent. This Sunday is the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee. Next week is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son. After that the Sunday of the Last Judgment. Are you seeing a theme here? The Church is helping us repent. We do not enter Lent by being sorry for our sins and simply begging forgiveness from them. Ash Wednesday is a beautiful thing, but there is no comparison to it in Orthodoxy. The stress, in our Church, is on repentance – metanoia – turning around and (like the prodigal son) heading in a different direction. Great Lent is a contest between us and our sinfulness. We struggle and pray so that, by God's grace, we might overcome them.

That is also why we fast. We do not fast so that God may see us, sitting in sackcloth and ashes, and have mercy on us (may God, indeed, have mercy on us!). We fast because, as Church fathers from St Gregory of Nyssa to St John Chrysostom to St Augustine have known, the desire to eat and the desire to sin are not fundamentally different. I am not saying that eating is sinning. I am saying that overcoming one kind of desire helps us overcome another kind of less-healthy desire (besides, let's be honest; most of us eat too much anyways). We have an appetite for sin just as we have an appetite for too much, or too fancy, food. When our stomachs grumble in church we ignore it, and pray a little louder. Likewise, when our habitual sins press themselves upon our souls, our reaction should be no different. We ignore them, and we pray a little louder.