One can say without exaggeration that the whole life of the Church is one continuous commemoration and remembrance. At the end of each service we refer to the saints "whose memory we celebrate," but behind all memories, the Church is the remembrance of Christ. From a purely natural point of view, memory is an ambiguous faculty. Thus to remember someone whom we love and whom we lost means two things. On the one hand memory is much more than mere knowledge of the past. When I remember my late father, I see him; he is present in my memory not as a sum total of all that I know about him but in all his living reality. Yet, on the other hand, it is this very presence that makes me feel acutely that he is no longer here, that never again in this world and in this life shall I touch this hand which I so vividly see in my memory. Memory is thus the most wonderful and at the same time the most tragic of all human faculties, for nothing reveals better the broken nature of our life, the impossibility for man truly to keep, truly to possess anything in this world. Memory reveals to us that "time and death reign on earth." But it is precisely because of this uniquely human function of memory that Christianity is also centered on it, for it consists primarily in remembering one Man, one Event, one Night, in the depth and darkness of which we were told: "...do this in remembrance of me." And lo, the miracle takes place! We remember Him and He is here—not as a nostalgic image of the past, not as a sad "never more," but with such intensity of presence that the Church can eternally repeat what the disciples said after Emmaus: "...did not our hearts burn within us?" (Luke 24:32).
Natural memory is first of all a "presence of the absent," so that the more he whom we remember is present, the more acute is the pain of his absence. But in Christ, memory has become again the power to fill the time broken by sin and death, by hatred and forgetfulness. And it is this new memory as power over time and its brokenness which is at the heart of the liturgical celebration, of the liturgical today. Oh, to be sure, the Virgin does not give birth today, no one "factually" stands before Pilate, and as facts these events belong to the past. But today we can remember these facts and the Church is primarily the gift and the power of that remembrance which transforms facts of the past into eternally meaningful events.
Liturgical celebration is thus a re-entrance of the Church into the event, and this means not merely its "idea," but its joy or sadness, its living and concrete reality. It is one thing to know that by crying, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me," the crucified Christ was manifesting His "kenosis" and his humility. It is quite a different thing to celebrate it every year on that unique Friday on which without rationalizing it we know with total certitude that these words, having been proffered once, remain eternally real so that no victory, no glory, no "synthesis" can ever erase them. It is one thing to explain that the resurrection of Lazarus was "to confirm the universal resurrection" (troparion of the day). It is quite a different thing to celebrate day after for one entire week this slowly approaching encounter between life and death, to become part of it, to see with our own eyes and feel with our whole being what was involved in John's words: "He groaned in the spirit and was troubled and... wept" (John 11:33-35). For us and to us all this happens today. We were not there in Bethany at the grave with the crying sisters. From the Gospel we only know about it. But it is in the Church's celebration today that an historical fact becomes an event for us, for me, a power in my life, a memory, a joy. Theology cannot go beyond the "idea." And, from the point of view of idea, do we need those five long days when it is so simple just to say, "to confirm the universal resurrection"? But the whole point is that in itself and by itself the sentence confirms nothing. The true confirmation comes from celebration, and precisely from those five days on which we witness the beginning of that mortal fight between life and death, and begin not so much to understand as to witness Christ going to put death to death.
The resurrection of Lazarus, the wonderful celebration of that unique Saturday, is beyond Lent. It is on Friday preceding it that we sing, "Having completed the edifying forty days...", and in liturgical terms, Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday are the "beginning of the Cross." But the last week of Lent, which is one continuous pre-celebration of these days, is the ultimate revelation of the meaning of Lent. At the very beginning of this essay we said that Lent is preparation for Easter; in reality, however, in the common experience that has by now become traditional, this preparation remains abstract and nominal. Lent and Easter are put side by side but without any real understanding of their connection and interdependence. Even when Lent is not understood as the season of the fulfillment of a once-a-year Confession and Communion, it is usually thought of in terms of individual effort and thus remains self-centered. In other words, what is virtually absent from the lenten experience is that physical and spiritual effort aimed at our participation in the today of Christ's Resurrection, not abstract morality, not moral improvement, not greater control of passions, not even personal self-perfecting, but partaking of the ultimate and all-embracing today of Christ. Christian spirituality not aimed at this is in. danger of becoming pseudo-Christian, for in the last analysis it it motivated by the "self" and not by Christ. The danger here is that once the room of the heart is purified, made clean, freed from the demon which inhabited it, it remains empty and the demon returns to it "taking with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter it and dwell there and the last state of that man is worse than the first" (Lk. 11:26). In this world everything—even — "spirituality '—can be demonic. Thus it is very important to recover the meaning and the rhythm of Lent as genuine preparation for the great today of Easter. We have seen by now that Lent has two parts. Before the Sunday of the Cross, the Church invites us to concentrate on ourselves, to fight flesh and passions, evil and all other sins. But even while doing this, we are constantly invited to look forward, to measure and motivate our effort by "something better" prepared for us. Then, from the Sunday of the Cross, it is the mystery of Christ's suffering, of His Cross and Death that becomes the center of lenten celebration. It becomes "going up to Jerusalem."
Finally, during this last week of preparation, the celebration of the mystery begins. Lenten effort has made us capable of putting aside all that which usually and consistently obscures the central object of our faith, hope, and joy. Time itself comes, as it were, to an end. It is measured now not by our usual preoccupations and cares, but by what happens on the way to Bethany, and beyond to Jerusalem. And, once more, all this is not rhetoric. To anyone who has tasted of the true liturgical life—be it only once and however imperfectly—it is almost self-evident that from the moment we hear, "Rejoice, O Bethany, home of Lazarus..." and then "...on the morrow Christ is coming ...," the external world becomes slightly unreal, and one almost experiences pain in entering into the necessary daily contact with it. "Reality" is that which is going on in the Church, in that celebration which day after day makes us realize what it means to expect, and why Christianity is above everything else expectation and preparation. Thus, when that Friday evening comes and we sing, "having completed the edifying forty days...," we have not only fulfilled an annual Christian "obligation"; we are ready to make ours the words which we will sing on the next day:
In Lazarus Christ is already destroying thee, O death, and where, O Hell, is thy victory .. .?