The night may be dark and long, but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon. “Do not deprive us of our expectation, O Lover of man!” - Alexander Schmemann
Jody Stowell's image of "Rejoicing in the Desert" recalls the "bright sadness" that readers of the Orthodox scholar Alexander Schmemann associate with the Great Fast. By this phrase, Schmemann--and, I believe, Jody-- meant the state of a heart whose fasting and prayer has so quieted the mind's chatter, that the undistracted spirit can be alert to things as they truly are. "Bright sadness" or "rejoicing in the desert" is both to mourn what has fallen and to hope for what is promised.
Anyone who has, be it only once, taken part in that night which is “brighter than the day,” who has tasted of that unique joy, knows it. On Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and live by it. . . Is it not our daily experience, however, that this faith is very seldom ours, that all the time we lose and betray the “new life” which we received as a gift, and that in fact we live as if Christ did not rise from the dead, as if that unique event had no meaning whatsoever for us? We simply forget all this — so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations — and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes “old” again — petty, dark, and ultimately meaningless — a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end... We may from time to time acknowledge and confess our various "sins," yet we cease to refer our life to that new life which Christ revealed and gave to us. Indeed, we live as if He never came. This is the only real sin, the sin of all sins, the bottomless sadness and tragedy of our nominal Christianity.
Now, may a thousand Lenten study groups blossom, as that is our custom. And may all Lenten retreats be occasions for the silent reflection that stills anxiety. But often a return to the heart of Easter requires a more personal journey through penitence and hope. Ordinary confession, fasting, psalms, and almsgiving may do much to lighten the load. As with any desert travel, a caravan of companions can be very helpful, and midweek eucharists are oases along the way. We must prepare.
What would Pascha [Easter] be without the white quiet of the Holy and Blessed Sabbath? The solemn darkness of Good Friday without the long Lenten preparation? Yet is not the sadness of Lent made into a "bright sadness" by the light which comes to it from the Pascha it prepares? If today the liturgy of the Church has ceased to be for so many people the deepest need and joy of their life, it is, above all, because they have forgotten,or maybe have never known, the essential liturgical law of preparation and fulfillment. They experience no fulfillment because they ignore preparation, and they ignore preparation because they desire no fulfillment. Then indeed liturgy appears as an irrelevant survival of archaic forms, to be enlivened by some "concert" or by artificial and tasteless "solemnity."
The rejoicing of that desert journey is the mood, not of an hour, nor of a weekend, but of the long season that it takes to cross the wide expanse. While the "bright sadness" of this journey lasts, even the savor of passing time is different.
Little by little we begin to understand, or rather to feel, that this sadness is indeed "bright," that a mysterious transformation is about to take place in us. It is as if we were reaching a place to which the noises and the fuss of life, of the street, of all that which usually fills our days and even nights, have no access--a place where they have no power. All that which seemed so tremendously important to us as to fill our mind, that state of anxiety which has virtually become our second nature, disappear somewhere and we begin to feel free, light and happy. It is not the noisy and superficial happiness which comes and goes twenty times a day and is so fragile and fugitive; it is a deep happiness which comes not from a single and particular reason but from our soul having, in the words of Dostoevsky, touched "another world."
|
