It is important that we return now to the idea and experience of Lent as a spiritual journey whose purpose IS to transfer us from one spiritual state into another. As we have already said, a great majority of Christians today ignore this purpose of Lent and see it only as a season during which they "must" fulfill their religious obligation— the "once a year" Communion—and comply with dietary restrictions, soon to be replaced by the permissiveness of the Paschal time. And since not only laity but many priests as well have adopted this simple and formal idea of Lent, its true spirit has all but disappeared from life. The liturgical and spiritual restoration of Lent is one of the most urgent tasks, but it can be accomplished only if it is based on a genuine understanding of Lent's liturgical rhythm and structure.
At the commencement of Lent, as its inauguration, as the "pitch" which is to begin the entire "melody," we find the great penitential Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. Divided into four parts, it is read at Great Compline on the evenings of the first four days of Lent. It can best be described as à penitential lamentation conveying to us the scope and depth of sin, shaking the soul with despair, repentance, and hope. With a unique art, St. Andrew interwove the great biblical themes—Adam and Eve, Paradise and Fall, the Patriarchs Noah and the Flood, David, the Promised Land, and ultimately Christ and the Church—with confession of sin and repentance. The events of sacred history are revealed as events of my life, God's acts in the past as acts aimed at me and my salvation, the tragedy of sin and betrayal as my personal tragedy. My life is shown to me as part of the great and all-embracing fight between God and the powers of darkness which rebel against Him.
The Canon begins on this deeply personal note:
Where shall I begin to weep over the cursed deeds of my life? What foundation shall I lay, Christ, for this lamentation?
One after another, my sins are revealed in their deep connection with the continuous drama of man's relation to God; the story of man's fall is my story:
I have made mine the crime of Adam; I know myself deprived of God, of the eternal Kingdom and of bliss because of my sins.
I have lost all divine gifts:
I have defiled the vestment of my body, obscured the image and likeness of God.... I have darkened the beauty of my soul; I have torn my first vestment woven for me by the Creator and I am naked....
Thus, for four evenings the nine odes of the Canon tell me again and again the spiritual story of the world which is also my story. They challenge me with the decisive events and acts of the past whose meaning and power, however, are eternal because every human soul—unique and irreplaceable—moves, as it were, through the same drama, is faced with the same ultimate choices, discovers the same ultimate reality. Scriptural examples are more than mere "allegories" as many people think, and who therefore find this Canon too "overworked," too loaded with irrelevant names and episodes. Why speak, they ask, of Cain and Abel, of David and Solomon, when it would be so much simpler just to say: "I have sinned"? What they do not understand, however, is that the very word sin—in the biblical and Christian tradition—has a depth, a density which "modern" man is simply unable to comprehend and which makes his confession of sins something very different from true Christian repentance. The culture in which we live and which shapes our world view excludes in fact the concept of sin. For if sin is, first of all, man's fall from an incredibly high altitude, the rejection by man of his "high calling," what can all this mean within a culture which ignores and denies that "high altitude" and that "calling," and defines man not from "above" but from "below"—a culture which even when it does not openly deny God is in fact materialistic from the top to the bottom, which thinks of man's life only in terms of material goods and ignores his transcendental vocation? Sin here is thought of primarily as a natural "weakness" due usually to a "maladjustment" which has in turn social roots and, therefore, can be eliminated by a better social and economic organization. For this reason even when he confesses his sins, the "modern" man no longer repents; depending upon his understanding of religion, he either formally enumerates formal transgressions of formal rules, or shares his "problems" with the confessor—expecting from religion some therapeutic treatment which will make him happy again and well-adjusted. In either case do we have repentance as the shock of man who, seeing in himself the "image of the ineffable glory," realizes that he has defiled, betrayed, and rejected it in his life; repentance as regret coming from the ultimate depth of man's consciousness; as the desire to return; as surrender to God's love and mercy. This is why it is not enough to say: "I have sinned." This confession becomes meaningful and efficient only if sin is understood and experienced in all its depth and sadness.
It is precisely the function and the purpose of the Great Canon to reveal sin to us and to lead us thus to repentance, and it reveals sin not by definitions and enumerations but by a deep meditation on the great biblical story which is indeed the story of sin, repentance, and forgiveness. This meditation takes us into a different spiritual culture, challenges us with an entirely different view of man, of his life, his goals, and his motivation. It restores in us the fundamental spiritual framework within which repentance again becomes possible. When we hear for example,
I have not assumed the righteousness of Abel, O Jesus, not having offered to Thee either an acceptable gift, or divine deed, or pure sacrifice, or life immaculate...
we understand that the story of the first sacrifice so briefly mentioned in the Bible reveals something essential about our own life, about man himself. We understand that sin is first of all the rejection of life as offering or sacrifice to God, or in other terms, of the divine orientation of life; that sin therefore is in its roots the deviation of our love from its ultimate object. It is this revelation that makes it possible then to say something which is so deeply removed from our "modern" experience of life yet now becomes so "existentially" true:
Filling dust with life, Thou hast given me flesh and bones, breathing in life; O Creator, Redeemer, and Judge: accept me repenting....
To be properly heard, the Great Canon implies, of course, knowledge of the Bible and the ability to share in the meditations on its meaning for us. If today so many people find it dull and irrelevant, it is because their faith no longer is fed at the source of the Holy Scriptures which for the Church Fathers were the source of faith. We have to learn again how to enter into the world as revealed by the Bible and how to live in it; and there is no better way into that world than by the Church's liturgy which is not only the communication of biblical teachings but precisely the revelation of the biblical way of life.
The lenten journey begins thus with a return to the "starting point"—the world of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, the world in which all things speak of God and reflect His glory, in which all events are referred to God, in which man finds the true dimension of his life, and having found it, repents.