Many people have the—I guess you could say—common assumption that Lent begins with Clean Monday, which this year falls on February 23, and that that is the beginning of the Fast which leads to the Great Feast, the center of our faith, which is Holy Resurrection—Pascha, Easter. But really, if we look at the ecclesiastical year, and we look at the cycle of services and the themes that are being introduced to us, that journey towards the resurrection of Christ begins today, with the beginning of the cycle called the Triodion. The Triodion, it’s named after a book that we use—the psaltis use and the priests use inside the altar—which is called The Triodion, and it begins today and ends right before the resurrection of Christ.

The themes of the Triodion are of repentance, of self-examination, of self-discovery, and we see that the Triodion starts four weeks before the actual Fast begins. We start today with the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, the theme of true repentance and pseudo-repentance, two different characters, and how we approach actual repentance and how we approach humility and whether we have true humility or not. Next week we will have the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, another beautiful story of repentance and coming back to the Father. The Sunday after that we have the Sunday of the Last Judgment. And the Sunday after that, which is the last Sunday before the beginning of the Fast, is the Sunday of Forgiveness, another beautifully themed Sunday.

All these themes that we have are done intentionally to prepare us for this journey, which we call in Greek the journey towards the resurrection, which is Great Lent. Even if we pay attention to the whole cycle of the year, we see that Pascha, the Resurrection, takes up a third of the year, if we take into account starting to today, leading to Pascha, and even the afterfeasts: the Ascension all the way up to Pentecost, which is fifty days after Easter. That whole block of time takes up a third of our year, which means that this Feast of Pascha is the most important. Most important not only for teaching, but most important for our own personal spirituality, that we dedicate such a long period of time to focus on one event.

Many people ask me, “Father, I really don’t feel that I can actually do the things that the Church asks me to do,” which is to fast, to pray, to confess, to go to more services. It seems a bit overwhelming, and it can be very overwhelming, especially when we’ve never done it before. Many people tell me, “Father, I’ve just become accustomed to fasting on the last week, Holy Week, and then I’ll just go into Easter and experience it.” Other people say, “Well, Father, I don’t even do that. I just show up for the Anastasi.” And as we can see with the thousands of people that show up on Anastasi night, that is usually the case, that many of our brothers and sisters simply show up for the light, as if the light saved them.

I always respond to people like this and friends of mine whom I grew up with that doing the journey, actually struggling through it and actually following the different traditions and the Fast, leading up to Easter and not doing it and simply just showing up at the end are two very different experiences. I used to have a professor in seminary who said it really beautifully to us. He said that the Lenten journey, and indeed the whole Triodion, is like climbing a mountain. The top, of course, is the goal. It is the union with God. It is the witnessing of the holy Resurrection. It is the beautiful view that you get from the top. So we begin from the bottom, and we struggle to climb this mountain. We have many difficulties: we fall, we get back up again. Some of us climb faster than others. Some of us turn around and help those who have fallen behind us; others help from behind. We all try to climb this mountain. For those who struggle and work hard and finally make it to the top, which is the end of Lent, beginning the actual Resurrection—for those the experience at the top is very, very different from [that of] those who simply hopped on the helicopter and flew to the top and got dropped off. Both will experience the view. Both will experience the light of the Resurrection. But those who struggled to reach the top, for them the experience will be completely different. They will appreciate it more, they will have a sense of accomplishment, and it will be much more of a profound experience than [that of] those who didn’t work for it but simply showed up.

I can attest to that even as a young man, growing up in Toronto. When I was a young man growing up, there were some years where I did the Fast, and there were some years where I did not, unfortunately. And I can attest to the difference in experience, of struggling and growing through the actual spiritual exercises and reaching that night of the Resurrection after having fasted for 47 days, and not only fasted but examining my conscience and going to confession and helping others and doing more volunteer work—the whole thing—and reaching that point of the Resurrection, it is a point that is quite moving, because we have opened up our souls, have cleansed our souls, and we have allowed for the light of the Resurrection to have entered into us. The years in which I did nothing—my heart was closed, so when I attempted to experience that light, it was not the same thing. It didn’t have the same spiritual potency as it did the years that I tried.

So I say all this not because I’m trying to force or trying to persuade everybody to go to church every Sunday, but rather so that we understand what the cycles of the Church are, why they are set up the way they are for the last 2,000 years, and why they work and why all these things are put in place to prepare us for what the Fathers say is the three-fold method of achieving salvation or achieving holiness.

For the Fathers, the three stages are katharsis, which basically means purification; photisis, which means illumination; and theosis, which means divinization, becoming like God, becoming holy. We have to understand that one cannot come before the other. First we have to purify ourselves before we can be enlightened. And after we are enlightened, we can actually become divine.

So if we don’t do these things, we will never be able to understand what the Church is talking about. We will never be able to see the reality which Christ reveals to us in the Resurrection. It will just simply be another night, another night of going to the church and lighting a candle and taking it back home, devoid of anything spiritual, devoid of anything that is truly profound in our lives. But for those who take the chance… And I hope that all of you take the chance this year, beginning with today, not to do everything perfectly—you can’t; that’s okay—but to try, to maybe take a few steps further, to do a little more than what you did the year before. And maybe next year you do a little more than that, but to try, a little bit.

And together we can climb the mountain, and together we can truly enjoy the light of the Resurrection as it’s supposed to be enjoyed, as it’s supposed to be perceived. It all begins with today, and it ends with the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on the evening of Pascha. Amen.