Forgiveness Vespers

I have never celebrated Ash Wednesday. When I was a Protestant, my church rejected Lent and all its trappings as too "Catholic" (anything remotely Roman was bad in my old church). Ash Wednesday was ignored. It seems like a beautiful ritual, being marked as a follower of Christ with a sign on the forehead, and one reminiscent of the seal placed on the forehead at one's baptism, to boot! Still, the emphasis that gets placed on personal sins – and the understanding of Lent as a time of penance before Easter – makes me worry that Ash Wednesday might feed into my legalistic compulsions.

As an outsider, I'm hardly equipped to say that Forgiveness Vespers is a "more beautiful" way of entering into Great Lent. I'm not even sure what such a statement might mean. Instead, I will only say that Forgiveness Vespers is beautiful.

The Forgiveness part of Forgiveness Vespers is tacked onto the end of a more or less regular Vespers service. The colors of the church are changed to purple. Then priests and deacons, standing on the ambo (platform) bow, make the sign of the cross, ask forgiveness of each other, and embrace. "Forgive me, a sinner," one says. "I forgive and God forgives" is the reply. This is followed by the clergy's families, then the rest of the faithful.

The church lines up and repeats this little ceremony. Moving from the front rows to the back, the faithful form a line of forgiveness that gradually wraps its way around the church, until everybody has exchanged forgiveness with everyone else.

The hardest thing, at least for me, about Forgiveness Vespers is not mumbling words about forgiveness or hugging people I barely know – or sometimes don't know at all! The hardest part is looking someone in the eye when I ask for forgiveness. Where I come from, looking someone in the eye means that I have to mean what I say. And, frankly, its a lot easier just to go through the motions and pretend I've wronged someone than to admit to myself that I've really sinned, that I harbored bitterness in my heart toward my sister, that I judged my brother, or that I gossiped about someone else's sins and made excuses for my own.

Not that Forgiveness Vespers make me feel especially guilty! Far from it! It makes me feel honest, which I suppose is exactly what it is supposed to do. After all, Great Lent is not exactly about sorrowing over our shortcomings while wearing sackcloth and sitting in a pile of ash (not that there's anything wrong with that). Great Lent is about confronting the dark sides of ourselves – the sides that we like to keep in the shadows and pretend aren't there – to hold our sins and our shortcomings up before our Heavenly Father, and, with the help of Divine Grace, to overcome them (even if we fail to do that most of the time).

Forgive me, a sinner.

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.