Great Lent
The Great Lent, my dear brothers and sisters, opens today and is completed after forty days on Lazarus Friday. As our Church introduces us to this blessed stage of spiritual struggles and virtues with the main weapon being the weapon of fasting and with the accompanying weapons of almsgiving, prayer, personal struggle, the sacraments, I think it is an opportunity to delve a little deeper into the way in which we will be able to overcome this struggle, to complete productively, creatively and spiritually the course of the forty days that stretch before us.
This course has an analogy in the treasure of the Old Testament. Its analogy is the march of the people of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land, with one difference – there the forty does not specify days but specifies years. That march, as recorded in the book of Exodus, and completed in the book of Joshua, took forty years. They were in bondage for five, if I am not mistaken, generations, the Israelites after Joseph to the Egyptians, and after terrible drama and commanding oppression they wanted to leave and return to their own land. And they set out, led by Moses, after a thrilling adventure, on this journey of return to the land where, as the book of Exodus says, honey and milk flowed. So Moses had promised them.
Let us look at some of the characteristics of this march and try to find the analogies to our own short forty-day march in this wilderness, the blessed wilderness of Lent.
The first element is that they have suffered as a people. They didn’t go it alone to escape slavery, but all together as a nation. They gathered, they assembled, they found their leader, they were given a leader, and they all started on this march. Imagine a caravan of thousands of people with the common element of feeling that they are God’s rich people and also that they have the kinship of nationhood. They all leave Egypt together and march across the desert. And we by analogy are one people, the people of God. We are the Church, all together. We all want to start and we all want to get there together. We are not content with the feeling that I alone or alone alone I will do this struggle, carry it through and in the end I will come out the winner without caring what happens to others. We want our salvation, our struggle, to be accomplished socially in the mystical body of the Church, all together. Not only those of us who are now, not only those who profess to be the Church, but even those who are in the arms of God without perhaps realizing it themselves. Just as God himself “wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”, in the same way we, the new Israel, want to leave the Egypt of this world, of worldly minds, of passions, of complacency, of falsehood and deceit, and to pass through the wilderness of our struggles to reach the place of God’s promise, of contact and communion with His saints, of the sense of His kingdom, of meeting His face, of the resurrection.
So the first element is that we do our struggle of fasting with the feeling that we are all doing it together. That is why we begin with the sequence of the Forgiveness, to reconcile. We are divided, we are cold, we have our differences, our petty differences, we put it all aside and as one body, one people, we begin the journey, forgiven, reconciled and fraternized, communion and communion with each other, with the feeling that we are all together in need of our salvation.
Second element. If you get a chance these days to read a little bit of the first chapters, especially the fifth and sixth, of the book of Exodus. There you will see thrilling dialogues between God and Moses. You will see Moses invoking a host of excuses for not responding to God’s honorable invitation for him to take over the leadership of the Israelite people and for him to be their guide. But in the end God persuades him. He convinces him and prepares him. In the first instance God reveals His name to him. Moses asks. , “Who are you?” and he replies, “I am everything, the One who exists, the source of life and existence, of being, in nature and in my essence I am everything.”
The second gift He gives him is that He gives him the ability to be a miracle worker, a person of signs, so that he can convince the Israelites, who had a thousand and two wrongs, egos, setbacks, faults, weaknesses, mistrust, misery and grumbling, as it seems all along the way. So He gives him these two gifts and at the same time His blessing, that He be their leader.
They started the race with a driver. And for us that means something. We can’t go through the struggle of the Great Tribulation or the desert struggle of this life without a spiritual guide. This, you know, is both a tradition and a tried and tested experience of the Church. Indeed, this guide is not only a guide, he is also a father. He must be the man of prayer, the man of conversation with God. He must be the man of parity with God, the man who, although he may possibly be slow of speech, without a spoken word, as mentioned in the book of Exodus about Moses, perhaps without external gifts, will be our appointed and divinely appointed man to be able to lead us on this path. He is our spiritual director. We very much need to find a spiritual director. To have him as our father, to have him as our teacher, to have him as our guide, to have him as our intermediary between us and God, to have him in front of us to hold our hand and to walk with us. Maybe our time is such that God does not give us such gifts. We often complain, and perhaps rightly so, that there are not many such spiritualists. But let it become our concern, our prayer, our effort, our struggle to find a man to teach us five or ten secrets of the spiritual life, so that he can supplement our inadequate prayer with his own prayer. That’s his job. His job is not to talk the talk, it is not to be an activist, an organ of works, but it is to be a man of prayer, illuminated by God who transmits his light to us.
The next element is to make a confession; to find a person who will be our spiritual guide, the one to whom our soul will be revealed with its faults and who will offer it as a sacrifice pleasing to God.
A third element of the Jews’ march was that God would suddenly change their path. They didn’t take the shortcut but made a full circle and crossed perpendicularly to the Red Sea. So they were confronted with an obstacle, confronted with a barrier, which they could not overcome except in a miraculous way. Perhaps we too, in our Lenten struggle, in this Lenten struggle, have our deadlocks. We will also find our temptations, because our course is analogous to the situation of the Lord’s forty days of life in the wilderness and the temptations which He also faced before He began the work of the Divine Economy, the work of His teaching and salvation.
We will therefore face deadlocks in this struggle. Usually dead ends of our logic, of our rationality. Many times deadlocks of our environment, not favoring us, not helping us practically, we won’t be able to do the fast. Some invitations will arise, some extraordinary manifestations, of course our empathic self, our rationality, our doubt will emerge and in front of this Red Sea we will back off. And then what is needed? You need the staff of Moses. To go to the spiritual one and strike our doubt, our difficulty, our hesitation, our temptation and retreat, make it to the shore and we too will pass as if by land without understanding how. May we experience this miracle and in the waters of the returning sea, may our calculations be submerged, our doubts sink, our obstacles, our temptations, our difficulties be drowned. The third element, therefore, that the course of Lent has in it is the miraculous passage through the Red Sea of the difficulties and obstacles that we will encounter.
It says again in the book of Exodus that finally, while Moses was the leader and guide, God was actually leading them. The one who was leading the way was God. And what did the presence of God look like? In two ways. By day as a pillar of mist, by night as a pillar of fire. By day a cloud covered them and gave them the sweetness and warmth of the divine presence, and by night in the darkness he gave them the light to find their way and go on. And we need this alliance with the sense of divine presence in our struggle, not that we are fighting alone, I mean without support from above. But through our prayer, through the humility of our hearts, through our sweet inner desires to bring out this feeling that our struggle is under the cloud of divine presence and in the light of divine affirmation. And so to proceed through the rest, as long as we have left at each stage, of the struggle of Lent.
They were hungry , he says at one point, they got tired, they burned out. They saw the miracle, they experienced the presence, they had Moses, they prayed for comfort, but they were broken in spite of themselves. How human! How natural! How expected! And to us expected, natural, expected, this thing. To strive, to see God’s blessings, but in the first difficulty of the desert heat and its heatlessness to kneel. So it was with the Israelites, but God said to them, “Do not be troubled, I am the One who is, I am not the One who is not, and so I am also near you and I see you and I watch you and I guide your steps. I took you out of Egypt, I promised you that I would lead you to the end of my promise. This I will do. Are you hungry? I will give you food.” And he then sent them a flock of quail, and when they woke up they saw a strange white thing like ice spreading around them, the manna, for them to eat. So he gave them two great things to fill their souls: quails and manna. Quail is the meat of worship. And God is giving us a month of worship opportunities this season. He gives us the blessed , apodeipna beautiful service! He gives us the proigiasmenes every Wednesday and Friday, He gives us the Greetings in this season, -we don’t sing those hymns another time-, He gives us the Matins Vespers, He gives us the five Sundays of the fasting , He will give us the beautiful feast of the Annunciation. He gives us this month of solid food, meat. There is nothing left but for a man to reach out and seize the opportunity, to open his mouth and begin to devour the message of divine truth as it is presented in the most tasteful way.
But he gives us the manna. It’s very simple. It fills our soul with the heavenly manna and the heavenly manna is the Eucharist. The heavenly manna is the mystery with which God feeds His people, the new Israel. He can feed us too. Our participation in the sacraments is necessary. If we have Moses, our spiritual director, then with his emptiness, if we have these inner desires and the need of our soul, accompanied by our repentance, let us not leave unused this treasure of the heavenly manna, the Eucharist, which can fall upon the ground of our soul and give this miraculous satiation.
But God did not give them only food. They gave it afterwards. He miraculously gave them water. He said to Moses, “With the same rod with which you struck the sea and it lifted and opened and you passed, with the same strike this stone and it will bring forth water.” Strike Moses and water comes out. That water quenched the thirsty Israelites in the wilderness. Similar water may have continually thirsted our own souls with the rod of our own Moses. And this is nothing less than the word of God. If we can in these days hear something, a little to open our eyes, somehow quench our souls with a word spoken, possibly a word written. There are books, patristic books, more modern books, the books of the followers, to find some time so that we too can, with this blow on the rock of the unknown treasure, experience the miracle of the revelation of the divine word in our hearts which are perhaps harder than the rocks.
The Israelites, while they advanced, while they overcame the obstacles, while they passed through the Red Sea, while they were filled in these ways that we have mentioned, their souls were thirsty, their bodies were thirsty, and immediately after a while they came face to face with an enemy: the sons of Amalek, the subjects of Amalek, the Amalekites. And there God performs His miracle. And there God says to Moses, who for a moment breaks down: “Do not be distressed and do not be dismayed, I will give you the strength to defeat the Amalekites. You may not expect them, they may be many, they may be threatening, they may possibly outnumber your own forces and your own multitude, but I will give you a way to win. You will raise your hands in the shape of the cross horizontally and while your hands are horizontal in a posture of prayer and in a symbolic posture, then you, the few and weak, will be able to defeat the many and strong.” And because he said his hands were weary, his two brothers Aaron and Horus held one hand and the other the other and while his hands were horizontal in this posture of the symbol of the cross and prayer, they were finally able to win and triumphantly continue their march towards the mount of Sina.
And we, despite our fasting, despite our good intention, despite our study, despite our participation in the sacraments, we have a terrible Amalek that fights us. And that Amalek is our own empathic self. We bring a declining nature full of beasts of passion that may for a time sit in the ark and possibly we too may despise them a little, but in the quiet of the wilderness of fasting and these seasons see where they will appear. He who does well in the struggle of fasting easily discovers his own unknown passions. In the wilderness they will raise their heads, in the silence they will raise their voices, in the apparent peace they will create unrest. These are the passions we can expect. The solution and answer is the sign of the cross and our prayer and divine intervention will give victory to each one of us, without fear and without cowardice and without finally being overwhelmed, to be victorious over our passions. And so to arrive like the Israelites on Mount Sinai, on the mountain which God himself now descends and gives them, in an atmosphere of earthquake, shaking and smoke, the ten commandments. He reveals His will to them.
This, my dear brothers, can also happen in our own lives. It must be done. We, too, should reach our own Mount Sinai, slowly ascending, walking through the desert, and there we should welcome the revelation of the divine will in our souls. Our struggle, our prayer, our faith, our trust in God, our good spiritual dependence on our own spiritual director, Moses, our participation in the sacraments, our hope of miracle and divine intervention, all this together with the struggle of fasting, together with the struggle of almsgiving, together with the struggle that each one of us will wage, can lead finally to the ultimate goal, to victory, to the Promised Land, to the blessing of God, to joy and to the experience of the Resurrection.
After forty days we will, with God’s help, have completed the year-long course of this Lent. May God grant that this experience of the procession, the experience of the search, the experience of the divine revelation, the experience of the miracle may be unending, so that the experience of the joy of the divine Resurrection may be unending and true. Amen.
Metropolitan Nicholas of Messogaia and Lavreotiki
