The Bright Sadness of Lent

Alexander Schmemman was the Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York and one of the leading liturgical scholars in Orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century. I’ve been re-reading his book on Orthodox Lenten practices, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha. In the weeks immediately preceding Lent, the Orthodox focus on five themes before they begin the Lenten journey: Desire for God (the story of Zacchaeus), Humility (the Publican and the Pharisee), Return from Exile (the parable of the Prodigal Son), Last Judgment, and then finally, Forgiveness Sunday.

Lent is about being liberated from sin. The triumph of sin, Shmemann writes, is the experience of division, opposition, separation, and hatred. We know that triumph far too well. The first chink in the armor of the mighty fortress of sin is forgiveness, which opens a pathway to unity, solidarity, and love. It is a breakthrough to a new reality, to God’s reality. “To forgive,” Schmemman writes, “is to reject the hopeless dead-ends of human relations and refer them to Christ.”

A friend of mine, a Syrian Orthodox priest in Worcester who was a student of Schmemann’s once described to me how this works. The liturgy for this day involves an elaborate dance as each person in worship is able to say to every other person there, “Forgive me, for I have sinned.” Now most of you know how hard it can be for us to forgive someone who has hurt us very badly. But at the very least, even when we aren’t yet able to forgive someone, we can remember that God forgives all who confess their sins and are truly penitent. So the liturgical response to the one who says, “Forgive me for I have sinned” is not “I forgive you” because, to be honest, that might not yet be true. Rather, it is this: “God has forgiven you.” Even as this dance is unfolding the choir is singing Easter hymns.

There is an atmosphere created in Lent, Schmemman says, a state of mind that our worship creates. The spirit of Lent, he says, is meant to help us to experience a “bright sadness” which is the message and the gift of Lent. We are invited to enter this season of “bright sadness” in order to experience that mysterious liberation, a liberation that makes us “light and peaceful” by illuminating an inner beauty that he compares to “an early ray of the sun which, while it is still dark in the valley, begins to lighten up the top of the mountain.”

The theological point, whether one is shaped by eastern or western Christianity is the same: Lent gives us forty days to work on forgiveness and reconciliation. But there is something sensible to me in beginning with the reminder that God arrives there before us. When we confess our sins, the good news of the Christian faith is that God does indeed forgive us. Lent, then, becomes a time for us to try to live more fully into that reality—a journey toward Pascha. It gets us to, as Don Henley once put it, to “the heart of the matter...which I think is about forgiveness.”