THE JOURNEY OF GREAT AND HOLY LENT
Over 250 million
Orthodox Christians worldwide,
including some six
million in North America, enter the season of Great
and Holy Lent each year on Clean Monday.
This solemn day marks the beginning of the period of
prayer and fasting that precedes the celebration of Easter (Pascha),
the most sacred and holy day of the Orthodox Church.
As Orthodox Christians
we have been given the blessed opportunity to enter into an
intense period of worship,
prayer, fasting, and philanthropy that will direct our lives
in the path of salvation and
draw us into deeper communion with God.
In addition, through
our observance of Lent in our contemporary world, we will offer
a witness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the one who
overcomes the darkness of
evil and sin and illumines hearts with truth and life."
The service that
ushers in the Season of Great and Holy Lent is known as the
Vespers of Forgiveness. The
celebration of the Forgiveness Vespers Service announces
the beginning of Lent and the approach of Pascha.
After the Entrance and
the chanting of "O Joyful Light" we hear the proclamation of the
Evening Prokimenon, the hymn
that announces the end of the day and the beginning of
another. This evening's Great Prokimenon announces the beginning
of Lent:
"Turn not away Your
face from Your servant, for I am in trouble; hear me speedily:
hearken unto my soul, and deliver it."
With this hymn
we begin Great Lent. Thrουgh its
words we see the mysterious
mixture of despair and hope, of darkness and light. All
preparation has now come to
an end. We stand before God, before the glory and beauty
of His kingdom. We realize that we belong to it, that we
have no other home, no other
joy, no other goal. We also realize that we are exiled
from it into the darkness and sadness of sin,
for we are ~n
trouble. ' And finally, we
realize that only God can help in that affliction, that only He
can
`hearken unto our souls.
Repentance is,
above everything else, a desperate call for that divine help. We
repeat the Prokimenon five times and then Lent has begun! Bright
vestments are put aside -
lights are extinguished. When the celebrant intones the
petitions for the evening litany, the choir responds in the
Lenten melody. Later, we will hear for the first time the Lenten
prayer of Saint Ephraim the Syrian. At the
end of the service, all approach
the priest and one another
asking for mutual forgiveness. We
will have to wander forty days through the desert of Great Lent,
yet at the end shines already the light of Easter, the light of
the Kingdom of God.
The Orthodox Christian Lent always
begins at sundown
Cheese Fare Sunday. The
first full day of Lent, however, is designated as "Clean
Monday," the Monday of
cleansing or purification. On that day Orthodox faithful
are required to begin a spiritual and moral purification
through fasting, prayer,
meditation, repentance, attending Lenten religious
services and partaking of the Sacraments of Confession and
Communion.
Religious services
during the Lenten period are especially beloved by Orthodox
faithful. They include the Great Compline, the Liturgy of the
Pre-Sanctified Gifts, the
Salutations to the Virgin Mary and the Divine Liturgy of
Saint Basil compiled in the 4th Century.
