Justin Appel
Dear Friends,
Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of our Lenten season.
Today we begin 40 days of preparation for Easter and the Paschal Mystery.
My own thinking about Lent has been shaped considerably over the last decade by a book called Great Lent by the American Orthodox theologian and academic teacher Alexander Schmemann.
Here are a few thoughts about the season for us to grasp:
Lent is a journey. It is not simply a prolongation of Good Friday. It is a season on which we embark on a path towards the glory and joy of resurrection: both Christ’s and our eventual rising and the concomitant destruction of death and sin.
The mode of the journey is that of “bright sadness.” While the destination radiates a glorious light, we approach that light from a place of darkness: the darkness within ourselves and within our collective being.
Through this nighttime, of which the Lenten season is itself symbolic of our lifetime, we progress through the darkness of sin, both our collective and my individual sin that separates us from God, towards the light that is the destruction of that sin within us.
The Lenten journey is thus a microcosm of the larger movement in our lives from sin towards Christ’s resurrection which “has happened and still happens to us.”
It is an intense and intentional moment for us to see clearly where we are and where we are going, for us to see the dramatic arc that our own lives may take if we dare to follow Christ in our full capacity.
“As we make the first step into the ‘bright sadness’ of Lent, we see—far, far away—the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom. And it is this vision, the foretaste of Easter, that makes Lent’s sadness bright and our Lenten effort a ‘spiritual spring.’ The night may be dark and long, but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon.”
—Great Lent: Journey to Pascha
In this season, the music of Arvo Pärt has a particularly powerful capacity to speak to this “bright sadness” of which Schmemann wrote.
I begin a playlist of music for Lent here with Pärt’s Festina lente. You can check this playlist later for more material as Lent progresses.
Yours in Christ,
—Justin
