Great Lent: The Path of Following Christ Metropolitan Ioann of St. Petersburg and Ladoga

THE MEANING OF THE GREAT FAST: 

The True Nature of Fasting
About Great Lent
What Should I Do During Great Lent?


The path of Christ is the path of every Christian. And I also went to tell you that the path that Christ the Savior followed is the path of every one of us Christians.

When the Lord called us into the bosom of the Church, when we received Holy Baptism, and then at a given moment were found worthy of grace, when the Divine light touched our hearts, then we felt an extraordinary joy and, as it were, found ourselves in the Upper Room with Christ. Then everything was luminous and joyful, because the Lord strengthened our spiritual and bodily powers, so that we tasted and knew how good the Lord is.

But out path did not end there. We followed Christ further. We followed the path of teaching, when we had to justify that Divine joy, that Divine grace, which had visited our hearts in the beginning of our ascetic struggle.

Here we, like the Apostles in their time, and like Christ, encountered all kinds of hardships, all kinds of difficult circumstances, and even began to waver. Or, like Christ’s followers of little faith, we even fell asleep at the moment of spiritual trials.

But in order to triumph over sin, in order decisively to establish good in our hearts, we are required to follow Christ even beyond the Garden of Gethsemane. We are required to continue on the path to the house of the high priests Annas and Caiaphas and to go to the Pretoria, to Pontius Pilate, and to hear the terrible words: “Crucify, Crucify Him!”

Then the path will lead us to Golgotha, so that we would be crucified with Christ with our passions and lusts. On this path, we are buried along with the Lord. And only after this will the resurrection of our soul take place. Only then will come the triumph of good in our hearts. And our spiritual rest will be even more established when we, having gone the way of the cross, will receive the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.

This is what we should feel and experience on our salutary path. This path is difficult, but it is essential to follow it. To follow it, in spite of hardships and distress – both from our neighbors, and from our own sinful habits… Sometimes we will not even know what to do. But if we will zealously keep to the path of Christ and, calling upon Divine help, will go fearlessly to Golgotha even to be buried along with Christ, then the Lord will send down upon us His Divine grace, strengthen our weak forces, and help us to overcome all our sinful passions, implanting in their place good habits that will help us to attain to everlasting life with our Lord Jesus Christ.

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Great Lent begins...( St. John Chrysostom )

The value of fasting consists not in abstinence only from food, but in a relinquishment of sinful practices, since he who limits his fasting only to an abstinence from meat is he who especially disparages it.


The change in our way of life during these blessed days will help us to gain holiness.

Therefore, we should let our soul rejoice during the fast.


St. John Chrysostom

During the Great Lent the Church makes an effort to wake us up to repentance.

During the Great Lent the Church makes an effort to wake us up to repentance. Heart-penetrating services, canons and frequent readings from the Old Testament are the tools for coming to realization of our sinfulness. The examples from the Old Testament caution us and, based on the experience of thousands of years, point us to the only way of grace: the way of communion with God.

God led the Jewish people to His Truth and Righteousness by means of various tribulations, long years of slavery and devastating diseases. All of the Old Testament is the story of God’s Righteousness punishing for sin and showing mercy. But despite such a multitude of punishments, the Jewish people often hardened their hearts and did not want to receive God’s rebuke.

Such hardening of heart can also be observed amongst us today. The Lord strikes us with tribulations, pours grief upon the stone-like ground of our heart, so that it may be ploughed and made ready to receive the seed of God’s grace; i.e. our hearts are often not receptive to the mercy of the Lord, even when He is showing us mercy in obvious ways. Like animals, we are still possessed by the fear of death, but do we fear God’s Judgment? The Lord is waiting for us to see in our troubles the axe and mercy of God, not just a coincidence.

Thus comparing the Old Testament with our time, we can see than both then and now the Lord cares for His people, not allowing them to perish in carelessness and iniquity. In various ways He leads us to repentance, calls us to again be united with Him, Who is the Source of life. Truly the love of God surpasses human understanding! His love goes to the extent that, according to the prophet Isaiah, for the sake of His chosen ones, for the sake of a small part of the people, He spares the whole people. For the sake of a few saints the kingdom shall stand. Thus God was leading his servants, showing Himself sometimes as a terrible and rebuking Judge, and sometimes as Merciful and All-Forgiving for the sake of man, to establish righteousness on the earth. (Indeed, there is yet another aspect of love, its protective power.)

If the Lord cared so much for his servants, does he not care even more for His sons? The Old Testament is slavery; the New Testament is sonship. We are no longer slaves in the Master’s house, but sons in the Father’s home. A slave strives only to please his master, and their relationship is measured by the slave’s work. But a son has a closer relationship with the father and is afraid of insulting him not only by action, but also by intention, lest he be separated from the love of the father; his relationship with the father is measured by feelings and thoughts. Yet to whom more was given, of him more will be asked. "We are children of God, but it has not yet been revealed what we will become,"-says the apostle; we have been given a lot, and it is up to us to multiply the Lord’s gift. It is up to us to set our feet on the warrior path, the path of the warriors of Christ, fighting on the battlefield of our hearts for the Truth and Righteousness of God. It is up to us to make a good beginning, since the Lord appreciates even our intentions, and everything else we will be able to do with the help of God’s grace.

Our weapon is frequent prayer, creative prayer beyond a mechanical repetition of memorized words. The Holy Church offers such prayers to us in the touching services of the Great Lent. The goal of our struggle is to acquire the inner peace of the soul. When peace finds home in our hearts, then we begin our blessed journey toward communion with God. The state of communion with God is so great, that this communion itself is our reward, the Kingdom of Heaven inside of us. This is what the Lord has called us to, so that here on earth we could in separate moments acquire eternity for ourselves. Amen.

St. Paisios on the Arena of Great Lent

Elder, how can I struggle more with abstinence during Lent?

Now during Lent those in the world in some way take greater care to show abstinence, but we monks must always be careful. Above all one must be careful, however, of the passions of the soul and then the body. Because if one prioritizes bodily asceticism and does not struggle to eradicate the passions of the soul, he will do nothing.

A layman once went to a monastery in the beginning of Lent and there a certain monk appeared to him to be abrupt and rough. However the poor man had good thoughts and justified him. He later came to me and said:

"I do not blame him, Father. After all, he just completed the Three Day Fast!"



If he had done the Three Day Fast in a spiritual way he would have had a spiritual sweetness and would have spoken to him with goodness. But he pushed himself egotistically to do the Three Day Fast, and so he placed blame everywhere.

Elder, what should I think about during Lent?

You should think of the Passion, the sacrifice of Christ. We monks must continuously live the Passion of Christ, and we are helped in this daily through the various troparia hymns – all the Services.

We are given the greatest opportunity during Great Lent to struggle and participate more in the saving Passion of Christ, with repentance and prostrations, with the cutting off of the passions and the decreased food, for the love of Christ.

We must utilize, as much as we can, this spiritual arena, with the many opportunities and preconditions it gives us to approach closer to the Crucified Christ, to be helped by Him and rejoice in His Holy Resurrection spiritually changed, since we would have lived Great Lent more spiritually.

I pray you good strength during Great Lent, that you may climb Golgotha to be near Christ, together with the Panagia and your Patron St. John the Theologian, and that you may participate in the fearsome Passion of our Lord. Amen.

From Γέροντος Παϊσίου Αγιορείτου, Λόγοι ΣΤ΄, «Περί Προσευχής», εκδόσεις Ιερόν Ησυχαστήριον «Ευαγγελιστής Ιωάννης ο Θεολόγος», Σουρωτή Θεσσαλονίκης 2012, σελ. 199-200..

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The Great Fast ( Hieromonk Moses the Hagiorite )

By Hieromonk Moses the Hagiorite, Vatopaidi Monastery, Mt.Athos

Many people ignore or do not will to acknowledge the true meaning of these days (of fast), consuming themselves with their routine (monotonous) everyday life. The modern man complains that life is tiring him, yet makes no step towards a fundamental change. He takes on strict diets sometimes, yet disregards the fast. He can make time for a counseling psychologist, can spend hours in front of television, but finds no time for a spiritual father or for the church.

Today’s man does not want to offer but he’d rather receive with not much effort or personal sacrifice. Too afraid to look himself in the eyes, he runs away from himself and struggles in his inner emptiness.

The Great Fast works like an X-Ray, like a (video) camera or like a mirror. In a certain way, we do not welcome it because it reveals our hidden reality.

Today’ spirit of consumerism, comfort and pride leaves man a prisoner of the many unnecessary things that have filled his life. The Great Lent is a halt in the routine rush of life and an opportunity for transfiguration. The prayer of blessed Ephraim the Syrian that in this period it is said hundreds of times during the religious services, urges us to abandon sloth, a lot of care, love of power and idle talk and gain purity, humble thoughts, patience and love. This beautiful and meaningful prayer ends by asking God: “Grant me to see my own faults and not to judge my brother…”



Let’s abandon gossip, judgment of others that continually stain our soul and let’s move the focus on ourselves correcting our fallings.

The Great Lent urges us to return to one-self and it contributes to our healing from the spiritual diseases that darken our minds and make our lives difficult and bitter.

If we manage to reach this self-knowledge and repentance, then the Great Lent will not be a gloomy and barren time for us, or a simple time to fulfill the “moral duties”, but an opportunity to soften our hardened hearts, which will lead us to the love of people and the love for God.

The excessive rationalism of the difficult time we live in, strives to keep us away from what is mystical, from all that is holy – unspeakable and beyond nature – mystery.

And the result of this state comes to light. Everywhere melancholy and despair reigns, wounding the soul. It is time to see from the depth of our hearts, that we have become estranged and, the time is ripen to return to the cradle of Crucified Love.

Often during the time of Great Lent, temptations, trials, tribulations and failures occur. These will come for us to mature, to acquire balance and a child like nature. Let’s not forget that the life of the Christian is one with the Cross. Without crucifixion comes no resurrection.

The Great Lent is a beautiful time for preparation, a semi-darken corridor leading us to the chamber full of light. The members of this preparatory time are prayer and fasting. But prayer and fasting without humility and love, bares no fruit. The fasting and prayer aim to temper our selfishness. Let’s not loose this opportunity offered once again by the Great Fast, as we’re slowly approaching its end. In the Church, our problems find their solution. The cold winter is followed by spring. Following the clouds, the sunny weather is even more beautiful. The Triodion is followed by the Pentecostarion. And now, as a wonderful hymn says, is the “time of repentance and the hour for prayer.”

The ‘slogan’ of Great Lent

“let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light”

The so called ‘slogan’ which we hear throughout Great Lent is the recommendation by Paul the Apostle, who calls upon us to cast off all our dark deeds and dress into the armor of light. “Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.” (Rom. 13, 12)

The first thing the Apostle points out is that we ought to accept that we often fall under the spell of darkness, namely of sin, and therefore our deeds are sinful. Indeed there is no man, particularly no Christian, who does not readily confess in a general and vague manner, that he is a sinner.

“Is there anyone who is not a sinner?’ we are often asked when we engage in this kind of talk. Nevertheless, such a general and vague acknowledgement is not what the Apostle seems to have had in mind. Because the vague recognition of our sinful condition most probably serves as an alibi of sin itself in the sense that we are all in the same boat so… In other words, we profess the sinfulness of human nature in order to justify it as something normal!

The Apostle however gives a dramatic tone to his call that we need ‘to cast off the works of darkness’ and of sin: Namely that whatever we do, whatever we talk about or even think about, if it is cut off from Jesus, who is the source of light, constitutes a sin and therefore is darkness. At the end of the day, he who does not act and live Jesus’ life, he lives a nonexistent life, even if his deeds seem great and important.

Our times are probably described by spiritual nonexistence since, not only those outside the Church but also we, the devout Christians, live in a manner which has nothing to do with Jesus; it is as if we are still living in the pre-Christ era. This been described as the ‘secular’ condition long ago; i.e. our lives are disengaged from Jesus’ presence. Therefore, practical atheism is distinctive of our era.

However, this tragic condition has already been pointed out by the Lord Himself. We are living dead. He, whose life is not distinguished by the Lord’s preconditions, is dead. Jesus’ words sound loudly and morbidly: “let the dead bury their dead” ( Matt.8,22). He, who does not receive Him and does not wish to become His disciple, is dead.

Therefore, ‘casting off the works of darkness’ means: we ought to cast off everything which causes our spiritual death and deprives us of the vitality of life. How is this possible? How can we get away from the snares of death? The Apostle says so clearly and precisely: by turning towards the light- “…putting on the armor of light”. We are only able to overcome what is negative by adopting what is positive. We cannot overcome darkness by shooting at it! It just naturally disappears when light approaches. The darkness of the night always gives way as soon as dawn and sunlight approach. Similarly, the darkness of sin disappears as soon as man turns towards the spiritual light- the Sun of Righteousness, the Lord, Jesus Christ. As the Apostle says: turning towards the light means: to ‘put on Jesus Christ’. “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13, 14).

However, there is a problem here. How am I being asked to put on Jesus Christ, since I have already done that through my baptism? The Word of the Lord has already stipulated that “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Gal. 3, 27). How am I to put on the same cloth that I am already dressed into? St Paul’s call means that all Christians who are already clothed into Jesus Christ ought to restore their garments. For we unfortunately continue to commit trespasses even after we have been baptized. Our negligence causes the dilapidation of that which ought to have been preserved as new.

Therefore ‘putting on Jesus’ means: that I, being baptized, ought to live in repentance. I am being asked to live a life of repentance in order to cleanse the cloth I have put on during my baptism. This is the reason why the Holy Fathers have described ‘repentance’ as a ‘second baptism’. Therefore, I stop being in the darkness if I chose the path of repentance, which assists me to restore my true self; to regain the light which flooded me on the day of my regeneration and my initial integration into the Church.

He, who manages to restore his cloth through repentance, lives a powerful and authoritative life. He says: ‘put on the armor of light”. Jesus’ light gives us the necessary armor and signifies the authority we have been given as children of God. “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1, 12).

What kind of armor are we talking about? We are talking about the armor of the Lord’s grace, the armor of the Cross. The hymnographer of our Church, guided by a similar description by St Paul, says: “The stadium where virtue is being accomplished has been opened. Those who wish to take up the fight against the enemy may enter… By taking on the whole armor of the Cross, let us fight the enemy. Let us use faith like an unreachable wall, prayer like a breastplate and alms giving like a helmet. Let us use fasting in the place of the knife, since it rips out any vice from the heart”.

Faith, prayer, love and alms giving and fasting: These are the weapons which belong to our spiritual armor. We ought to take them up not only during the blessed period of the Great Lent but also throughout our entire lives.

The only thing we have to do is to recognize the authority which was given to us and use it. Our final destination peers from afar full of glory and grace. This is where we will fully participate in the Resurrection; we will enter the Kingdom of Heaven which is our true abode!

Have a Great Lent and Happy Easter!

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