Every year around this time, people ask me about recommendations for reading during the Great Lenten period. I always try to point out that the fundamental reading for the lenten time is the Bible. Certainly, if we are not rooted and grounded in the Bible, other reading that we do will not be very helpful. There’s a certain order in reading that’s necessary, and we have to be reading and re-reading and re-reading the Bible all the time. So I would say the fundamental book for lenten reading is the Bible!

However, I know that Lent is short—40 days—and the Bible is large—what should we read? So if we were saying: Well, what could you recommend in scriptural reading, reading from the Bible, during the lenten period that would be most helpful for this time of year? And here I believe the answer could be, simply: Why don’t we carefully read what the Church itself prescribes for us to read during this particular period? What would that be?

First of all, it would be in the Old Testament, the book of Genesis and the book of Proverbs, because at all the lenten vespers services we are instructed to read readings from Genesis and readings from Proverbs. If you go to vespers during Lent, those are the readings that you will hear. Most people go to vespers during Lent only at the Presanctified Liturgy, which is a vesperal liturgy, and so they know that at that service, the readings are from Genesis and Proverbs. Now, I would say that that would be something that we could do. Genesis is not a very long book, Proverbs either, not very difficult. So if we just took a little time every day to read from Genesis, to read from Proverbs, that would be very helpful.

Also, during the lenten season in church, we read from the prophecy of Isaiah. At the sixth hour every day in the monastic cycle, there is a reading from the prophecy of Isaiah. Now Isaiah is a long book; it’s 66 chapters long, and if you were going to read Genesis and Proverbs and Isaiah, it would be pretty hard to do that if you have a limited amount of time. So what I would suggest that the first cut would be, the first abbreviation would be, to read Isaiah 1-12 and then to read 40 to the end, 40-66, the end of the book, especially 40-66: that includes what’s often called 2 Isaiah; it includes the prophecies about the Servant of Yahweh, which the New Testament very specifically connects with Jesus. It also speaks about the end of the ages; it speaks about the coming kingdom of God. So that would be really great to read, and 1-12 would introduce you to the book, and that would have the chapters about the opening of Isaiah and the sign that Ahaz gives and so on. So if you had 40 to the end and the chapters at the beginning, that would be 38 chapters. So still, that’s pretty heavy, but in any case, I think that would be the recommended lenten reading, certainly what the Church gives us to read during Lent.

Now also you have the Psalms, the psalter. Now, in normal Orthodox liturgical worship, the monastic people, they read the psalter through once a week. During Lent, it’s doubled: they read the whole book of Psalms through twice in a week. Now here I think it is pretty clear that Orthodox Christian people should be reading psalms all the time. The psalms and the New Testament Scriptures are certainly foundational, the psalms and the New Testament. So I would definitely say that a discipline for Great Lent would be to read the psalms.

Now the psalter in Orthodox tradition is divided into 20 sections. They’re called kathismas; that means you sit down and you listen in church. Each kathisma is divided into three stases, three sections. So you would have the book divided into 60 sections. Now, if you just took the kathisma and said there’s [20] sections, and you doubled it, you would get 40. So you could read the psalter through twice during Lent if every day you would read one of the kathisma sections. You could easily find out what they are just by going to a liturgical psalter or by just seeing how the psalter is divided up. You should be able to do that.

Here I would just say—not to get too legalistic or whatever—still it would probably be more humble, more modest, more reasonable, more realistic simply to say that, as an Orthodox Christian, I will read psalms during Lent. I will try to read the entire psalter at least once during Lent, if not twice. Now, reading it just once during Lent should be relatively easy to do. I mean, the psalter is not that long, and you could read a few psalms every day, and that would be very, very helpful to one’s spiritual life. So here I would definitely suggest that the psalter be something that you consider for your lenten reading.

So we have Genesis, Proverbs, Isaiah, and the Psalms. Then the question would be: Well, what about the New Testament? Here, of course, we could always be reading the gospels; we could always be reading St. Paul. But I would suggest for this particular time of the year that we would read what the Church gives us to read from the New Testament. Here I would even boldly say let’s just bracket the gospels for now. Let’s just say that during the lenten season and our penitential time we won’t read the gospels at all! Maybe we could read them from Pascha to Pentecost; maybe during the Paschal season, the 50 days after Easter, we could plan to read through the entire New Testament, or at least several books of the New Testament, like the Gospel of St. John and the Apocalypse, for example. Those would be Paschal readings.

But, getting back to Lent now, here’s my suggestion. My suggestion is to read the letter to the Hebrews. Why? Because it’s assigned to be read. At every single Divine Liturgy during the lenten period—that means every Saturday, every Sunday, and the feast of the Annunciation, which are the only full Divine Liturgies we have during Lent—we read from the letter to the Hebrews. And the letter to the Hebrews, it tells us how to understand the death of Christ on the cross as the sacrifice that is offered once and for all to the Father, Jesus offering his own body on the tree of the cross, and this is the heart of Christian liturgical worship.

And of course, the letter to the Hebrews was written exactly to say to Christians how do we worship, especially how do we fulfill the Temple worship of Israel when the Temple has been destroyed, when the Messiah has come, when there is no more sacrifices of all these animals and so on—what do we do? Well, we don’t need to do that any more! Jesus Christ on the cross has fulfilled that all, and this is all explained, described and explained, in the letter to the Hebrews, which, again, is not so easy to read, but if you read it slowly, if you read it through a couple of times, it’s only 13 chapters, and it’s even only 13 pages long.

So, for example, let’s just say that during the lenten period, a person would read some psalms every day, would maybe read the end of the Prophet Isaiah, and would read the letter to the Hebrews a little bit every day. Maybe a proverb or two or whatever, maybe some Genesis. But you have to decide yourself what you’re going to do in steady discipline and do it. But here I think the Church would recommend to us again: Genesis, Proverbs, Psalms, Isaiah, and the letter to the Hebrews. Genesis, Proverbs, Isaiah the Prophet, the psalter, and the letter to the Hebrews.

So I would just recommend that you make up a discipline for yourself where you give yourself, I don’t know, 10-15 minutes a day and read a little bit from each of these books. Maybe not even each of them; maybe just the psalter and the letter to the Hebrews, maybe just Isaiah 40 to the end and the letter to the Hebrews, and leave out Proverbs and Genesis, which you can hear when you go to church for the Presanctified Liturgy a little bit. But the main thing, all the holy Fathers would say: Set a rule that you could keep, that’s not too hard, and that you would really just try to do it. I think that would be the most helpful way of dealing with the holy Scriptures. I think that there’s just no doubt about that at all.

Now there are two other books… Well, let me first add one more thing that’s very traditional. In the Orthodox tradition, the one spirituality book that became connected to Great Lent was the book called The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus. In Orthodox monastic tradition, the monks read or listen to it being read during the lenten season, and it was a practice that during the lenten season, maybe when they were eating or maybe at some of the vigil services, the reading from The Ladder of Divine Ascent would be read. This is a very tough book, and it is for monastics. It’s definitely for monastics, but if a person wanted to get The Ladder and to read through it during the lenten season a little bit every day, perhaps even skipping the chapter about the prison and that radical sixth-century 28-day program they had for these messed up monks—but in any case, maybe just reading the beginning, reading the sections on gluttony, on porneia, sexual sin, on silence, on spiritual reading, on prayer, on the virtues like humility; that could be very helpful. So if you had a book called The Ladder of Divine Ascent—St. John is celebrated on the fifth Sunday of Lent—you could read through that.

Kallistos Ware once said that The Ladder is probably the most-read book in Orthodox tradition through the centuries after the Bible itself. If you ask the question: What book, in addition to the Bible, is most read in the Eastern Orthodox Church tradition? The answer would certainly be The Ladder. I believe that the same Bishop Kallistos, if I’m not mistaken, said probably in Western Christianity the most-read book after the Bible was The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. I would not recommend that book. Oh, it’s good to read if you want to read it; it was even translated into Russian and so on, but it’s not high on the recommended list; it’s not. The Ladder, reading The Ladder slowly, carefully—rather easy to read because there’s just sections of sayings—can be very careful to you, and then you would be sort of within what Eastern Orthodox Christianity does during the lenten season.

But there are two books also that I would recommend that are about Lent. If a person said, “Okay, Fr. Tom, this is great. I’m going to give myself a disciplined reading of Scriptures during Lent that’s going to be part of my lenten discipline. I’m going to fast, I’m going to pray, I’m going to give alms to the poor. I’m going to try to live the way I should live all the time, and I know that living the way I ought to live all the time would be regularly reading the Scriptures. So I’m going to try to read, somehow, some way, in some selected way, from Genesis, Proverbs, Isaiah, Psalms, and the letter to the Hebrews, or parts of those. Okay, I’m going to do that. But is there some book that can help me with Lent itself? Is there a book that I could read or books that I could read that are about the lenten season? They kind of speak about what is done during Lent and why it’s done and how it’s done and what the lenten kind of—what can you say?—the dynamic of Lent, the shape of Lent, the form of Lent, the substance of the piety. Is there something that can help me with Lent itself?”

And here I would say that there are several books, and if you go to, for example Light and Life Publishing Company, and they sell books, you would see that there are a number of books there about the lenten season written by various people in various ways, some very popular, some a little bit more technical or whatever. But the two that I would recommend, the two books that I would recommend if you want specifically books about lenten reading, would be the book Great Lent: Journey to Pascha that was written by Fr. Alexander Schmemann. Fr. Schmemann wrote this book a long time ago; it was written in 1974. That’s 37 years ago, if my mathematics here is correct. That’s a long time ago. This book may be dated a little bit because in this book Fr. Alexander was trying to restore Lent to the life of the Orthodox Church and to the life of the Orthodox people, particularly to restore the liturgical shape and framework and substance of Lent to the people.

You could say nowadays in the 21st century, 37 years later: Isn’t that kind of strange? What do you mean, restore it? Was it gone? Did it disappear? And the answer is: Yes, that it had! Believe it or not, it had. Certainly the Orthodox Church always had Great Lent. Certainly the Orthodox Church always had prayer and fasting and almsgiving during this season and preparing for holy Pascha. Certainly the Orthodox Church always had going to confession during Lent, repenting during Lent, trying to change your life during Lent, trying to return to God during Lent. But the liturgical life was reduced not only to a bare minimum, but it was practically even disappeared.

For example, in most churches when I was a young fellow, the lenten services were kind of pietistic services. Some churches had the paraklesis canon to the holy Theotokos. They maybe connected it with the Akathist Hymn to the Sweetest Lord Jesus. In some churches of the more Byzantine tradition, they would have Small Compline with a section of the Akathistos Hymn that was read on the fifth week of Lent, broken up into sections, so you would have the Small Compline and then at the end a couple of parts of this Akathistos Hymn to the Theotokos Virgin Mary. And basically that was the lenten worship during the week. Very few churches served the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts.

When I was a young man, a high school boy, as a matter of fact—when I was a high school boy, one of my aunts gave me as a gift a book called Three Liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and they were the texts of St. John Chrysostom Liturgy, St. Basil the Great Liturgy, and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. Well, I was familiar, very familiar, with St. John Chrysostom Liturgy. Certainly I knew that during Lent we had St. Basil Liturgy; we never had it on Christmas Eve or Easter Eve: we just never served it. But on Sundays during Great Lent, we knew that the priest’s prayer was longer and we had to sing “In Thee Rejoices All Creation” instead of the usual Theotokos hymn. We knew there were a few differences, but we had no idea what they meant or why. But as far as the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts was concerned, many of us didn’t even know that it existed. I never was at a Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts until I was 18 years old and went to the seminary.

But anyway, I got that book for Christmas from my Aunt Helen, and I remember taking it to our pastor, our priest, whom I loved, a dear man, and said, “Father, I know these two liturgies of John Chrysostom and Basil, but what’s this Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts?” And I’ll never forget his answer. He said, “Oh, that’s an old-fashioned liturgy that they still serve in a few monasteries in Europe, but it hasn’t been served regularly for centuries. It’s kind of fallen out of use.” That was his answer!

Now, certainly in some of the churches in America, the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts was served. It was very often served in the morning of Wednesdays and Fridays, not in the evening, although it’s an evening service; it’s a vesperal service. In fact, just the other day, a fellow was at the monastery, and he said, “Fr. Tom, why do we serve the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts in the evening in our church? Is it because the people are working during the day and they can’t come to church?” And I said, “Well, actually, no, that’s not the reason. The reason is because it’s vespers.” The service itself is a penitential vespers with Communion attached, from the Gifts that were consecrated at the last, previously celebrated Divine Liturgy, which would usually be the previous Sunday. Sometimes that’s Annunciation, if that falls on a Monday or a Tuesday. But at the last Divine Liturgy you’re going to have before the Presanctified is served, you consecrate the Gifts and you have holy Communion. So it’s an evening service.

Well, these were almost never done anywhere, and Holy Week itself was very emasculated in those days. You’d have these pietistic services, then you’d have the Twelve Gospels on Thursday, vespers on Friday, putting the shroud in the tomb, practically nothing on Saturday, and then just the Easter midnight matins and the Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning. In other words, in those days, as we say, “in those days,” the liturgy of the lenten season was very, very reduced, emasculated, and certainly not as powerful in the lives of the normal Orthodox Christian people.

Well, Fr. Alexander Schmemann—and many others with him; certainly he was not alone—but one of his great goals in life was to restore liturgical practices properly to Orthodoxy, particularly in America, and especially speaking about Great Lent, to restore the lenten liturgies the way the Lenten Triodion, in other words, the service book of the Orthodox Church, teaches us how to do Great Lent; and to try to bring that into the life of the parishes as much as we possibly can. And that’s why he wrote this book in 1974, published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, still available and still being sold.

Well, for many people now when they would read this, they would say, “Well, gee, this is kind of a funny book,” because he’s making a big apologetical plea for the reinstatement of something that we do all the time, that’s just very normal, that’s just a natural part of our life. But you have to know it was not a normal, natural part of the life of the Church in America in 1974. It was not. In the first parish that I went to in 1963, one of the biggest things that I had to do was to restore the proper type of lenten services within our parishes, and it was hard to do, because people were used to the Akathistos; they were used to Paraklesis. I had to sometimes do both of the services while also doing the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, and then I also had to add the first week of Lent, like the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, which was sometimes done but sometimes not done in many of the churches. So there was a lot of work to be done.

So Fr. Schmemann wrote this book to kind of explain it all, propagate it all, get people to follow it, and so this is what he wrote. It’s not a very long book; I think it’s 130 pages on, not counting the notes, the footnotes. It’s 133 pages long, but it begins with “Lent: Journey to Pascha”; he says a little bit about the entire season. Then he has a chapter, about 25 pages, on the preparatory Sundays for Great Lent: Zacchaeus, Publican and Pharisee, Prodigal Son, Meatfare Sunday, Forgiveness Sunday. Most churches did not have Forgiveness Sunday celebrations, either, at that time. They may have had the Sunday Liturgy with these gospels, but that’s about all that they had.

So he begins with that introduction. Then he has about another maybe ten pages on the shape of lenten worship: how the services are, what their tone is. He speaks about what Scriptures are read at these services, like I already mentioned the doubling of the psalter, the Genesis, the Proverbs, the Isaiah. He has a section on the lenten prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, which is at every daily lenten office of the Church, which we should use at home, by the way, also during Lent, the prayer: “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power…” that very short prayer, familiar to you.

But he explains that prayer, which, by the way, the Byzantine tradition doesn’t use at the Presanctified, so those of Greek Orthodox and Antiochian Orthodox traditions, unless they’ve been influenced by the actual Typikon itself or by Russian practice, they would not have this prayer, but that prayer is there. He comments on it, and then he has a long chapter of another ten pages or so, relatively long, about the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts: what it is, how it is, where it came from, why it’s structured the way it is, and how it should be done. And he explains how this liturgy is the quintessential lenten service in the Eastern Orthodox Church and that you’re not allowed to serve full Divine Liturgies of Chrysostom on weekdays, which many Russian and Ukrainian and Romanian churches in fact were doing. That’s not right; we’re supposed to fast from the Divine Liturgies on weekdays except for Annunciation and have the Presanctified twice a week, normally on Wednesday and Friday. With the vespers you have this Communion. You fast all day to receive Communion in the evening, not in the morning.

And here I just want to say again: I really think that that’s important, that it be in the evening. And I must say that I’m rather unhappy that even our monasteries sometimes serve the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts in the morning. You know, it’s just not right. You can’t sing, “Lord, I call upon thee; hear me. I raise my hands in evening sacrifice,” and it’s nine or ten o’clock in the morning. You can’t say, “Now we have come to the setting of the sun, and behold the light of evening,” and the sun is still on its way rising; it hasn’t even risen completely! As someone once said, it’s bad enough to lie, but it’s really bad to lie to God liturgically, when you sing a song about a sun setting when it’s not really setting. Well, that’s something really to think about and I really wish we would address that issue. At least I wish our monastics—that’s their duty, to do things as prescribed, and Presanctified Liturgy is an evening service; it’s vespers. And then you have the readings from Genesis and Proverbs. Sometimes in some churches, they’ll even read Isaiah from the sixth hour, which is noon, because people aren’t in church at noon.

Then Fr. Schmemann in this book speaks about the lenten journey as a whole. He speaks about the Great Canon in the first week. He speaks about the Saturdays and the Sundays: some are memorial Saturdays; some of them have other meanings, like the Theotokos Saturday toward the end of Lent. He speaks about the Sunday liturgies during Lent: what is read there and why. He speaks about the letter to the Hebrews. He speaks about why the cross is brought out in the middle of Lent; in the middle week there’s a veneration of the cross. Then he speaks about the end of Lent, how we’re getting close to the raising of Lazarus and Palm Sunday. So he discloses and explains the shape of the lenten journey.

And then he speaks about taking Lent seriously in our life, actually putting it into practice, doing it the way we’re supposed to. He talks about restoring prayer and fasting and almsgiving, about the lenten style of repentance, about the participation in lenten services. So he has some pages on that, and then in the end he sums up the whole book by saying how the restoration of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church is almost like a recovery of the Orthodox tradition itself, that because of the Turkish yoke, because of Communism, because of lots of reasons, our liturgical life became emasculated—it was reduced, it was changed; a lot of things crept in that shouldn’t be there—and how if we would take seriously the restoration of the Great Lenten season—liturgically, ascetically, spiritually, with the readings, with the fasting, with the alms, with the services—what a richness this would be to our Church!—with repentance, with confession and holy Communion.

It would be, he called it, a total rediscovery: a total rediscovery about what Lent was about, as a kind of mini life. Because you may know that, in our Church, our Great Lenten season is a time when we try to be what we’re supposed to be always, and do what we’re supposed to do always, because we should be praying and fasting and reading and alms-giving and repenting and confessing all the time. And in this tithe of the year, as Lent is called in the services, we should at least be doing it then, not because it’s the only time we’re supposed to do it, but remind us that we’re supposed to be doing it all the time.

And then that also tells us, Lent tells us that our life is fulfilled in the resurrection of Christ. It’s fulfilled in his death and resurrection and our own death and resurrection. It is fulfilled in the second coming of Christ, when all the dead will be raised and the kingdom of God will come. So the lenten journey is like a journey to God’s kingdom. It’s like a mini life. It kind of symbolizes our whole life as waiting for the Lord to come, expecting him to come, preparing for him to come, being vigilant for him to come. And even each Presanctified Liturgy is that when it’s served in the evening, because you fast all day and you wait for him to come in the holy Eucharist at night on those given lenten days. So the Presanctified days, the whole season, it kind of symbolizes our entire life, and Fr. Schmemann tried to show how that is so and how we can understand it.

The epigram of his book is: “O Lord, Lover of mankind, do not deprive us of our expectation!” And our expectation is for Easter, the resurrection of Christ, our resurrection, the resurrection of all the dead, the coming of God’s kingdom: that’s our expectation. And during Great Lent, we live in that expectation. So that’s a pretty good book to read during Lent if you want to read about Lent.

Now the other book is like a sequel to Fr. Schmemann’s book, and it’s called The Lenten Spring, and I wrote it. I wrote it, very consciously and purposefully following Fr. Schmemann’s book. I wrote this book in 1983, so you can see how long ago that was. That’s, what, 28 years ago? I wrote that book for a very particular reason. What is that book? It’s a book of 40 lenten meditations, which, if a person wanted to, they could read one each day during the 40 days of Lent. If they begin on the first day and end on the Friday before Lazarus Saturday, they’ll read the entire book.

The book is not very long; it’s 160 pages long, so if you have 40 meditations in 160 pages, you can see that that’s—what is it, about four pages of meditation. And what I meditate on or reflect on or expose or describe or explain in these 40 readings, 40 readings for Great Lent—I think that’s the subtitle: “Readings for Great Lent,” yeah: The Lenten Spring: Readings for Great Lent. What I intended to do was very simple. It was to provide for the people a way of living through the lenten season when they can’t get too often to church or perhaps even not to church at all during the week, because all the lenten services are weekday services. The Saturdays and Sundays during Great Lent are just like the other regular time of the year. To get the lenten flavor, you’ve got to go to church on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday! But who can do that?

Now, those services are rich. You know, the Lenten Triodion book begins on the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee. Then you have the Prodigal Son. Then you have the Last Judgment. Then you have the Sunday of Forgiveness and the expulsion of Adam and Eve. You have Meatfare, Cheesefare—and, by the way, they’re called Meatfare and Cheesefare because it’s farewell. You say goodbye to meat, goodbye to cheese. In Latin, for example, the word for “meat” is carne, and the word for “farewell” is vale, so carnivale is when you say goodbye to meat, so a carnival celebration is the last time you would eat meat. In the West they even call it Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday in the West. But in our Church, Lent begins on the Monday, Clean Monday, and we have a full 40 days before Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday. It’s different from the Western Christians.

But in any case, what I wrote these 40 readings for was to expose people to the songs that are sung during those pre-lenten Sundays, then the songs that are sung in the first week of Lent, the second week of Lent, the third week of Lent, fourth, fifth, sixth week of Lent. The Scripture readings that are read, some sections from Isaiah, some sections from Proverbs, Genesis, commenting on the letter to the Hebrews. Basically what it is is that, for people who can’t get to church, you take this book, The Lenten Spring by Thomas Hopko—that’s me—and that will help you to have the lenten life in your life, the lenten reality in your life, when you’re not able to go to the church for the church services. Because in each of the 40 meditations, you have songs from the church services and Scripture readings that are read in the church services, with my commentary. Hopefully that will help you to understand.

So, for example, reading number one is “The Lenten Spring Shines Forth.” The book is called The Lenten Spring. Why is that? Well, the song that I quote is the Cheesefare Wednesday vespers which says, “The lenten spring shines forth, the flower of repentance. Let us cleanse ourselves from all evil, crying out to the Giver of light: glory to you, O Lover of man!” So what I do is I just quote the song. Then I quote another hymn:

The grace of abstinence has shone forth, banishing the darkness of demons. The power of the fast disciplines our minds. Lent brings the cure to our crippling worldliness. Daniel and the Children in Babylon were strengthened by fasting. One stopped the mouths of lions; the others extinguished the flames of the furnace. As you saved them, O Christ our God, save us also, for you are the Lover of mankind.

So then I have other hymns quoted, like the one that says, “The lenten season testifies to these things given to us by our God, the crucified Christ, for the salvation of our souls.” So you have a chance, by reading this, to read what you would hear if you went to church, so that gives you an opportunity to hear what’s going on in church at the lenten services. There’s plenty of material with commentary.

Now the first reading is one, two, three pages long; that’s all it is. The second reading, “Let Us Begin With Joy”: so again I quote the hymns from church. “Let us enter the fast with joy, O faithful. Let us not be sad. Let us cleanse our faces with the waters of dispassion, blessing and exalting Christ forever.” Because we don’t have ashes; we wash our face when Lent begins. Another hymn: “Let us begin the fast with joy. Let us give ourselves to spiritual efforts. Let us cleanse our souls. Let us cleanse our flesh.” So this is what we want to do. And then what I put in there are the readings that would come on the weekend liturgies. I put in there sections of them. I put in some sayings from Church Fathers that help to explain this.

And so all the way through—and there’s 40 of them— The third one, “Sanctify the Fast; Gather the People,” I put in the reading from Joel that is read in the church right before Great Lent is going to begin, on the week before Lent. I have a section, “Return to the Father,” about the Prodigal Son, which is read on the Sunday, and you have the hymns about the Prodigal Son two weeks before Lent begins. Then I have a section on Psalm 137, “On the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept,” because at least in the Russian tradition, this psalm is read on the three Sunday matinses—on matins on each of the three Sundays before Great Lent begins. Then I have about the expulsion of Adam and Eve, which is on the Sunday right before Great Lent begins. Then I have a section on forgiveness, because that’s Forgiveness Sunday. So I have hymns from the services and sections from the Scriptures which are part of the church service.

Then I have, number nine here for example, the pre-lenten Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee: you have hymns about opening to me the doors of repentance. And this is sung at the matins every single Sunday until Palm Sunday, that we sing in church. So I bring what we sing in church and what we read in church into this book. Then you can buy this book, take it home, and you could read each one of these every day and live the lenten season in your home. You could read it to your children; you could read it out loud in your family. And this compensates for the fact that you can’t be in church.

And then of course I comment on the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete; I comment on what repentance is; I comment on confession; I comment on spiritual reading; I comment on the intercession of the saints that’s increased during Lent; I comment on the meaning of Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy), which is multiplied during Lent; I comment on the prayer, “O Lord and Master of my life…” of St. Ephraim. And so you have 40 readings that assist you to have a lenten 40 days without being able to go to church during the weekdays. And then so you enter into the life of the Church with this book.

And here I do think that many, many people have told me that this was very, very helpful to them, because otherwise they’d have no idea what is actually read and sung in the penitential services during Great Lent, which are the weekdays of Great Lent, when people normally don’t go to church very much. Now, thanks be to God, in our time a lot of our parishes are increasing the lenten services during the week. Many of our parishes do have services every day. Almost all of our churches have the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts at least once a week if not twice, so you hear those readings, you hear those songs, you get involved in those penitential prayers—but if you can’t go to church, you don’t! So the next best thing is to take extracts of those services, the main part, the meat of the matter, so to speak, and do it at home.

Now of course, if you want to, you can purchase the entire Lenten Triodion; you can get the Lenten Triodion. Well, let me correct myself: not the entire one. But there is a Lenten Triodion that has the main parts in it and the weekend parts in it that you can purchase, and then you could read those things at home, too, if you want to. But they don’t give much of the weekday services after the first week, so to have that you’ve got to have the entire Lenten Triodion book, which literally, 99.99% of the people will not have. Where are you going to get it? And all of these are not all translated into English either. So, fortunately, I have access to the translations of these hymns in English that are sung at the services that were done in the last decades and already back in 1984 I commented on all these—the canons, the hymns, the verses, the Bible readings—for the sake of the normal, regular, everyday Orthodox Christians so they could have some sense of Lent and have some sense of it at home.

So, excuse me, this can seem self-serving, but it’s not, I hope, God forgive me, but I really do think that—well, I can simply tell you: Many, many, many people have thanked me and St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press for putting together this little book, The Lenten Spring, 160 pages long, of 40 readings that help you to have a lenten season when you’re not able to go to church every day, and to help you to have Lent in your home, to help you to have access to what is being done in church, and to help you form your mind and your heart and your attitude and your behavior in order to keep Great Lent as fully and deeply and truly and really as you possibly can as a lay person, living in the United States of America or Canada or wherever, English-speaking lands, where you can have access to the very life of the Church itself in your very own home.

So I would suggest definitely, again, begin with the Bible: Genesis, Proverbs, Isaiah, or sections from them. Do definitely read psalms, a little bit every day. Definitely read the letter to the Hebrews at least through two or three times during the lenten season. Do that. It’s only 13 pages long. Maybe get a book like The Ladder, a tough spirituality book, and read a little bit from that, although I don’t think that’s essential for the regular, everyday Christians. But if you get Great Lent by Fr. Schmemann, you will have a better idea of what this season is all about and how it’s given to us by the crucified Christ in the Orthodox Church. And if you get The Lenten Spring, the little book that I put together, many years ago, 28 years ago or whenever it was, this will help you to bring the lenten spirit, the lenten words, the lenten style, the lenten attitudes, the lenten commandments, the lenten Scripture readings into your own house and hopefully into your heart, into your own mind, into your own reality.

So I would definitely suggest Great Lent by Fr. Alexander Schmemann and The Lenten Spring by myself. For this is Fr. Thomas Hopko for Ancient Faith Radio.

• The Orthodox Study Bible for Genesis, Proverbs, Isaiah, Psalms, Hebrews
  
• The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus
  
• Great Lent: Journey to Pascha by Fr. Alexander Schmemann
  
• The Lenten Spring by Fr. Thomas Hopko
  
• The Lenten Triodion
  
• The Lenten Triodion Supplement