A reflection given after Pre-Sanctified Liturgy at St. John’s Russian Orthodox Church in Winfield, Pennsylvania, on Wed., Feb. 21, 7533 (3/5/25 on the civil calendar). Glory to God!

Brothers and sisters,

In this first week of Great Lent, known as Clean Week, we have our time of spiritual spring-cleaning in the Church. It is a time for purification when we re-live that stage of our journey to Orthodoxy as catechumens, once upon a time, or current catechumens receive new emphasis, for striving to clean our lives with God’s grace. To set aside childish things. To remember and re-live, in effect, the prayers of exorcism said over us as we newly arrived in the Church. For those of us who have been baptized it is also then a renewal of our baptismal vows.

Lent in English means spring.

It reminds us of our Lord’s teaching that (John 12:23-36)

The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, еxcept a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honour.

The seeming fallow soil is teeming with life ready to burst forth in Spring.

Likewise during Lent we prepare to come to life in the Resurrection of Pascha, just as in our baptism we are immersed in the waters, to come forth from the death of the old man to live in the light of Christ, to empty ourselves in Him. The Church calendar also supports this. Our new year is in the fall at the death of the year so to speak, indicating then the birth of the life to come. And in some ancient Orthodox lands, the new year at the same time also was celebrated in the spring at the time of the Annunciation. This living symbolism showed an overlapping truth, that in the cycles of death and life in our fallen world lie the promise of resurrection, which ultimately integrates the bodily and the soulful, by God’s uncreated grace sparkling in our hearts. Thus “the evening and the morning were one day,” and God saw that all was good in the original unfallen world, a state to which the Church shows us the Way, Jesus Christ.

For we are told that all Creation is in Him. Genesis 1:1 and the Gospel John 1:1 are the great bridge of the Old and New Testament in both the cosmological life of Holy Orthodox Church and in Salvation or our soteriological life. They apply, too, to the springtide of Lent.

For we are told in them, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” And, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” So the beginning also is the Word, and when all was made, all was made in the Word, in the Logos, Jesus Christ.

In Genesis 1:1, in the Septuagint used by the Orthodox Church the Greek verb is more personal, translated in English usually “made” rather than “created,” and related to poiesis for shaping, from where we also get the term poetics. This term helps convey this personal sense of Creation. Christian teaching emphasizes that Creation is made from nothing, and man is so made by the Trinity, but all are made in Christ.

In the fall of Adam and Eve, there was a great objectification of man by man, and by man of Creation, through the pride and false passions of disobedience and delusion. We fell into the double-thinking of the devil, not able to directly experience God’s Creation and removed in our hearts from God’s uncreated grace. Jesus Christ changed this by His birth at Nativity. Then he fully opened the way to Paradise and beyond at Pascha, for He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

During Lent, the springtide of our souls, the Church provides for us to join the expectation of Creation for the restoration, renewal, and transformation of Pascha.

“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,” the Apostle Paul writes to us. “And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:22-23). Indeed do we so in this springtime preparing for the time of Resurrection, the Lenten Spring.

Glory to God for all things!