User:Dclark/Great Lent is peaceful and beneficial
Great Lent is peaceful and beneficial. A voice seems to say, “Stop, Christian, and examine your life.” The streets are empty. There are no carriages. You can see meditation in the face of the passerby. I love you, O time of reflection and prayer. (N.V. Gogol, 1836)
I am not one to be particularly nostalgic for times gone by, but at this moment of enforced quiet and solitude, I find myself embracing the sentiment that Nikolai Gogol expressed so beautifully in the mid-19th century. Great Lent should be a “peaceful and beneficial” time. Yet, far too often, it is even busier than other times of the year.
For clergy, Great Lent is a time of more celebrations, more visitations, of teaching, preaching, edifying the faithful, of cleaning, baking (constant), and preparing for Holy Week, Pascha, Bright Week and beyond. At the end of the day, whenever that comes, we nap fitfully only to repeat all of the above and more the next day. Too often, Great Lent is reduced by the clergy to a time of constant activity and worry with spiritual development wedged into whatever available time remains or done at the same time as other activities. For choir directors, constant work on the music, on setting up, taking apart, filing, rearranging music, attending every service, worrying if anyone will show up to sing, who will show up to sing (too often, several people singing the same part) is the norm. After Pascha, the feeling is less one of overwhelming joy and thanksgiving, but one of exhaustion for those responsible for leading the faithful.
For the laity, the first flourishes of increased activity and commitment tend to evaporate as the concerns of daily life overwhelm us. We mean well, but lack time and energy to do all that we know we should do. This conflict between what we are called to do and what we can do leads to irritation and annoyance. This is revealed by our dismissive attitude toward the Church and those who lead us (been there, done that). Doesn’t the priest understand that we have lives to live. We have needs, hopes, dreams. We are masters of our own fate and we will not allow anyone or anything to sway us from our chosen path!
And yet, here we are: 21st century United States of America shut down, fighting for our survival, fearful of what may come. At first, we tried to ignore the pandemic, hubris run amok. Then, we embraced it only to realize the medicine is a bitter pill to swallow. Now, here we are: powerless, hoping everything will rapidly return to the way it was before COVID19, and fearing that nothing will ever be the same. What has become of us?
Instead of pining for the past or fearing the future, we have been granted a unique opportunity. We have the possibility of growing in faith and love by practicing what we should have practiced during the Great Fast all along. God has given us this moment to reflect on the course of our lives, to rediscover what really matters most: a deep and abiding communion with Him and with each other. We have an opportunity to see ourselves naked and unadorned, free of pretense and illusion. This can be terrifying, more terrifying that the pandemic, for we spend so much of our time and energy constructing a story of ourselves that we want the world to remember, instead of realizing who we are, putting our trust and hope in God, and growing in faith and love in the abiding communion of perfect love that is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a communion we are emboldened to reveal through our lives in this world.
Brothers and Sisters, it is easy to fill our lives suddenly void of routine with a new routine that leads nowhere, that reveals nothing. Instead, let us heed the example of St. John of the Ladder whose text “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” instructed monks of old, and, by extension, all faithful at all times, to abandon the illusions of selfish existence and strive to embody that love we experience in God through self-denial, prayer, acts of kindness, compassion, and love. It is not too late to turn this fragile time into one of great growth for us and for the life of the world. Amen.
Fr. Robert
