Keeping Lent

As a child, I used to give up candy or movies or snacks for Lent. I couldn't quite see those things were fine to do any other time of the year, but not in Lent.

As a teenager, I began to observe fasting, realizing that it had a connection to the idea that mankind did not depend upon food alone, but upon the Word of God alone, understanding that we must get sustenance for living with meaning and direction from God's Word. That was easier said than done.

As an adult, I have undertaken fasting as well. That of course, do not mean not eating, or drinking water, for forty days In my own discipline, I eat a vegetarian diet. Combined with the Fast, my own discipline, besides the Daily Offices, has been on Repentance and on readings from the Scriptures and of the Fathers of the Church, and contemporary spiritual writers, for spiritual sustenance. All these disciplines have helped me to prepare for the day of Judgment and, especially the Paschal Mystery in Holy Week and Eastertide.

All of us, including me, are repeat offenders, and must repent endless times. But there will be the Day of Judgment.

If that day of judgment is anything like an event that happened to me one Saturday morning as I was traveling to Rutland from Lydonville, Vermont for a meeting. I was on of US 2. A car pulling a travel trailer was just ahead of me. However, the trailer was not properly loaded; the excess weight weight at the back of the trailer around bends in the road would lift the read end of the car up, which caused the driver to pull into the left land to stabilize the car and trailer.

We were heading down a steep winding hill above the town of Marshfield. Coming up my lane was a car with five young people in it. If I stayed in my lane, there would be a head on collision. I was petrified for an instant, until I made up my mind to crash my own car into the guard post and wires, with the possibility that my car and I might plunge the five hundred or more feet down the embankment. As soon as I made my mind up, all fear left me. But suddenly my entire life passed before my eyes in slow motion. And I felt God's love and His protection. My car, a VW bug, did not break the posts or the wires.

So I am here writing about keeping Lent.

Patriarch Kirill of Russia, had this to say in a sermon he preached in 2013 on the Sunday of the Last Judgment. (Matthew 25. 31 -46)

“The judge no longer speaks of the Commandments; rather He speaks of deeds. And we know that the list could go on, for it concerns not only the sick, the naked, the hungry, the thirsty, or the prisoners, but also speaks of helping any person... Why does helping another person redeem our own sins? Because it is in this help, and in this ability to accomplish good works, that the greatest of the commandments and the greatest of values is revealed. A person without love in his heart is incapable of doing such things.”

Patriarch Kirill in his own Words, pp. 230- 231. New York, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press

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