Great Lent

Great Lent does not begin with ashes, as Western Lent does, but with forgiveness. On the evening of Forgiveness Sunday, at a Vespers service that turns from gold to dark in mid-service, the whole parish asks and grants forgiveness face to face — and the fast begins from that clean slate. The next day is Clean Monday, the first day of the fast, and the forty days run from Clean Monday to the Friday of the sixth week, when the hymns declare the forty days complete.

What follows is not counted in the forty: Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday form a two-day festival hinge, and then Holy Week — strictly speaking a separate and even stricter fast — carries the Church to Pascha. The whole journey, from the pre-Lenten Sundays through Great Saturday, is governed by a single service book, the Triodion; the weeks of preparation before Clean Monday have their own entry.

Lent is easiest to recognize with your ears. The full Divine Liturgy is not celebrated on Lenten weekdays — a fasting day is a day of expectation, not festival — so on Wednesday and Friday evenings many churches serve the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, a candlelit Vespers at which Communion is given from Gifts consecrated the previous Sunday. Sunday itself keeps the Eucharist in full, using the longer, older Liturgy of St. Basil the Great.

Threaded through every weekday service is the Lenten prayer of St. Ephrem — a few lines against sloth, despair, love of power, and idle talk, and for chastity, humility, patience, and love — accompanied by prostrations to the floor: Lent is prayed with the body. In the first week, the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, an immense poem of repentance, is sung over four evenings, and it returns entire in the fifth week; it has its own entry. On Lenten Fridays, Greek practice sings the Akathist to the Theotokos in weekly portions; Slavic practice sings it whole on the fifth Saturday — one of many points where uses differ without anyone being wrong. The weekday readings set aside the Gospel for the old preparation books: Genesis, Proverbs, and Isaiah.

Each of the five Sundays has a face. The first is the Sunday of Orthodoxy, commemorating the restoration of the icons in 843; the second honors St. Gregory Palamas, the great teacher of prayer; the third sets the Cross in the middle of the church — and of the fast — for veneration; the fourth remembers St. John Climacus, author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent; the fifth, St. Mary of Egypt, the desert penitent who is living proof that no one has fallen too far.

The traditional Lenten rule sets aside meat, dairy, eggs, fish, wine, and oil, with wine and oil returning on weekends and fish on Annunciation and Palm Sunday. But the rules, and the reasons beneath them, are treated fully in Why Orthodox Christians Fast and Orthodox Fasting Rules — including the principle of economia, by which the fast is fitted to each person's health, circumstances, and experience, ordinarily with a priest's guidance. What belongs here is the proportion: fasting is one leg of a tripod. The Fathers insist that a Lent of food alone is wasted; the money and time it frees are meant for almsgiving, and the appetite it quiets is meant to make room for prayer.

Modern Orthodox writers like to call the Lenten atmosphere a bright sadness, and anyone who has stood through a Presanctified Liturgy knows why the paradox fits: the lights are low and the melodies grave, yet the mood is not misery but the particular quiet of a house preparing for a wedding. Lent is called the spring of the soul. It exists entirely for the sake of what it precedes — forty days of turning around so that, on Pascha night, the words "Christ is risen" land on people who have been walking toward them for seven weeks.