The Journey to Pascha
By Fr. Alexander Schmemann
My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
At this time, we are in the midst of our Lenten Journey. It is important for us to not lose heart and to press onward. Lent is given to us each year as a gift to help us to overcome the mundane routine of life and to reorient ourselves towards Christ, Who is truly our life. I pray that the following article, written by Fr. Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory, will encourage all of us to focus our attention on the task at hand, increasing our desire to come to our Lord by fasting, praying and taking advantage of all the beautiful services that are made available for us and our families. +Fr. Photios
When a man leaves on a journey, he must know where he is going. Thus it is with Lent. Above all, Lent is a spiritual journey and its destination is Pascha, the Feast of Feasts. It is the preparation for the fulfillment of Pascha, the true Revelation. We must understand this connection between Lent and Easter, for it reveals something very essential, very crucial about our Christian faith and life.
Is it necessary to explain that Pascha is much more than one of the feasts, more than a yearly commemoration of a past event? 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 Pascha 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. It is a gift that radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it possible for us to joyfully affirm: Death is no more! Oh, death is still there, to be sure, and we still face it and someday it will come and take us. But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage — a Passover, a Pascha — into the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory.
Such is that faith of the Church, affirmed and made evident by her countless Saints. 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 oldagain — petty, dark, and ultimately meaningless — a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. We may from time to time acknowledge and confess our various sinsyet 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.
If we realize this, then we may understand what Pascha is and why it needs and presupposes Lent. For we may then understand that the liturgical traditions of the Church, all its cycles and services, exist, first of all, in order to help us recover the vision and the taste of that new life which we so easily lose and betray, so that we may repent and return to it. And yet the oldlife, that of sin and pettiness, is not easily overcome and changed. The Gospel expects and requires from man an effort of which, in his present state, he is virtually incapable. This is where Great Lent comes in. This is the help extended to us by the Church, the school of repentance, which alone will make it possible to receive Pascha not as mere permission to eat, to drink, and to relax, but indeed as the end of the old in us, as our entrance into the new! For each year Lent and Pascha are, once again, the rediscovery and the recovery by us of what we were made through our own baptismal death and resurrection.
A journey, a pilgrimage! Yet, as we travel through the bright sadness of Lent, we see — far, far away — the destination. It is the joy of Pascha, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom. It is this vision, the foretaste of Pascha, that makes Lent's sadness bright and our Lenten effort a spiritual songI. 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!
New Church Directory To Be Published
We are planning on publishing a new church member directory with availability late March 2008. Parish members will receive notification by email and in our March newsletter to confirm their participation as well as have the opportunity to advertise their business. We are also trying to include a pictorial directory and get as many photos of our members and families as possible. This is a great tool for people to associate names with faces so that we all get to know each other better. If you would like more information or to get a jump on signing up, then Click Here or click on the Church Directory link on this page.
