Prot. No. 71
CATECHETICAL HOMILY
At the Opening of Holy and Great Lent
+ BARTHOLOMEW
By God’s mercy Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome
and Ecumenical Patriarch
To the Plenitude of the Church
May the Grace and Peace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,
Together with our Prayer, Blessing and Forgiveness Be with All
Most honorable brother Hierarchs and blessed children in the Lord,
By the goodwill and grace of the all-merciful and all-benevolent God,
already living in the blessed and reverent period of the Triodion, tomorrow
we enter Holy and Great Lent, the arena of fasting and “venerable
abstinence” that eliminate the passions, during which the depth and wealth
of our Orthodox Tradition and the vigilant care of the Church for the
spiritual progress of its children are revealed. As we are reminded by the
Holy and Great Council of Crete (June, 2016), “the Orthodox Church, in strict
conformity with the apostolic precepts, the synodal canons, and the patristic
tradition as a whole, has always proclaimed the great significance of fasting
for our spiritual life and salvation” (The Importance of Fasting and its
Observance Today, para. 1).
In the life of the Church, all matters have a solid theological foundation
and soteriological reference. Orthodox Christians share the “common
struggle” of ascesis and fasting “giving thanks in everything” (Thess. 5.18).
The Church invites its children to run the race of ascetic exercises as a
journey toward Holy Pascha. It is a central experience of the life in Christ
that genuine asceticism is never despondent, since it is imbued with the
expectation of resurrectional delight. Our hymnology speaks of the “spring
of fasting.”
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In this sense, far from the trappings of Neoplatonist dualism and the
alienating efforts to “mortify the body,” genuine asceticism cannot
conceivably aim at the eradication of an “evil body” for the sake of the spirit
or the liberation of the soul from the torment of its shackles. As emphasized,
“in its authentic expression, ascesis is not directed against the body but
against the passions, whose root is spiritual because the intellect is the first
to fall to passion. Thus, the body is hardly the great opponent of the ascetic.”
The ascetic endeavor pursues the transcendence of egocentrism, for
the sake of love that “does not seek its own” and without which we remain
enslaved within ourselves, in the “insatiable ego” and its unquenchable
desires. Being self-centered, we shrink and lose our creativity, as has been
said: “Whatever we give is multiplied; and whatever we retain for ourselves
is lost.” For this reason, the wisdom of the Fathers and the experience of the
Church associate the period of fasting with the “showering of mercy,” with
good deeds and philanthropy, which are the evidence of surpassing self-love
and acquiring existential fullness.
Such wholeness is at all times the characteristic of life in the Church.
The liturgical life, ascesis and spirituality, pastoral care and good witness in
the world, are expressions of the truth of our faith, interconnected and
mutually complementary elements of our Christian identity, which share the
eschatological Kingdom as a point of reference and orientation, as well as
the completeness and fulfilment of the divine Economy. While church life in
all its expressions reflects and depicts the coming Kingdom of the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit, it is the mystery of the Divine Eucharist that above all,
as underlined by the late Metropolitan John of Pergamon, recently of blessed
memory, “expresses the Church in its fullness” (The Image of the Heavenly
Kingdom, Megara 2013, p. 59). “Pure communion,” the rendering of our
existence into that of the church, as participation in the Holy Eucharist,’ is
the “end” of fasting, the “crown” and “prize” of ascetical struggles (see John
Chrysostom, Homilies on Isaiah VI: On the Seraphim, PG 56.139).
Today, in an age of desacralization of life, when humankind
“attributes great importance to entirely insignificant things,” our Christian
mission is the practical elevation of the existential depth of our Orthodox
“triptych of spirituality,” as the inseparable unity of liturgical life, ascetic
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ethos and solidarity, the essence of the revolution of values in the fields of
ethos and civilization constituted by faith in Christ and the divinely-granted
freedom of the children of God. We consider it of paramount importance
that we should live Holy and Great Lent as a revelation and experience of
the true meaning of freedom “for which Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5.1).
With these thoughts and sentiments of love and honor, we wish you,
our most honorable brothers in Christ and spiritual children of our Mother
Church throughout the world, a smooth course in the arena of fasting,
invoking on all of you the grace and mercy of Christ our God, who always
delights in the ascetic struggles of His people. To Him belongs the blessed
and glorified power of the Kingdom, now and always, and to the ages of
ages. Amen.
Holy and Great Lent 2023
X BARTHOLOMEW of Constantinople
Your fervent supplicant for all before God