Finally.

IC XC
✙
NI KA

LENT IS Finally Here. Today, 18 March, is about as late as Lent can be in the Eastern Churches using the Julian Paschalion. I’m not sure what the exact latest date is, but today is pretty close. Look: I love Lent. I especially love Byzantine Lenten Practices, not least the fasting. We’re essentially vegan from now until Pascha (5 May) with a few exceptions. There is no meat at all, unless you count the Fish we get to eat a couple of times – The Annunciation (25 March) and Palm Sunday (28 April). So, fasting is fun. Then comes the extra services: most parishes add something to their liturgical calendar in Lent. There are a lot of options available: weekly services, daily ones, nightly ones, Friday devotions. Parishes may add book groups and other folks of education. My old Orthodox parish adds a weekly Lenten Supper to keep the community growing strong.

Lent is a time of ascesis – asceticism in English, podvig in Slavonic, or jihad in Arabic. Spiritual struggle: it’s not just or even primarily about food and extra services, but rather what they are intended to do.

The Christian is called to bring his body under control – not just in Lent but always. And the body likes to be comfortable: it likes to be warm, toasty, clean, well fed, worked out, tucked into bed at night, and to be given time off for good behavior – extra treats, interpersonal interactions of an adult nature, or even intrapersonal ones. All these things are said to be “natural”.

But we have a fallen human nature – not a natural one at all.And lent i a chance for us to try and escape the rules of “perfectly normal human behavior” and move on to something supranatural: sainthood. God is calling us all to be saints – what the Latin Church refers to as “the universal call to holiness”. We are called to struggle towards that highest human calling with God’s grace. There’s nothing of value we can do alone – only with God’s help.

So Lent is here. Finally. A time to escape our subnatural nature and move ever so slightly closer to what God intends humans to be: “The human being is an animal who has received the vocation to become God,” St. Basil said. “The human vocation is to fulfill one’s humanity by becoming God through grace” (Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (Hyde Park, NY: City Press, 1993), 76).