Over the last 7 weeks, I went through Great Lent as an Orthodox Christian neophyte. It was my first year celebrating Lent, and all in all, I found it to be a very fruitful one, having discovered much about myself and the salvific powers of Christ and His Church. In this post, I would like to capture in writing a general sketch of how the spiritual journey of Lent unfolded for me over the 7 week period. May God guide me to write truthfully and unpretentiously as I record my accounts of the events here.
Great Lent: A Preamble
From a secular standpoint, Lent is a quaint and unassuming Christian celebrations, almost trivial by the standards of modern sensibilities. Unlike Christmas, it has not been subjected to as much infiltration and modern influence and is thus the lesser known of the two Christian celebration. In the Orthodox tradition, Lent is a time where we believers submit ourselves to more stringent ascetic practices. Generally, these practices fall into the following 4 categories of fast, prayers, reading of spiritual books and alms giving. On Easter day itself, Orthodox Christians celebrate Christ's resurrection with a long service that last through the entire night (9 PM - 3 AM). After which they take a break and return to church at 9:30 AM to attend the mornings service and the final celebratory feast which brings the season to an end.
As a whole, nothing about Lent and the celebration of Easter marks it out to be anything special, especially when contrasted with the spectacles of other modern festivals such as the Olympics or World Cup, where extravagant fireworks and glitzy parades abound. To secular sensibilities, it is also bland when compared with Christmas, which nowadays is celebrated with modern exuberance, with people reveling in the delights of rich food, Christmas movies and shiny presents.
In Malaysia, where festive holidays abound, the unassuming Lent trailed quietly behind the dusty heels of a series of more fashionable public holidays, Christmas, New Year & Chinese New Year, receiving little attention for itself from the general public. Thus, without the usual environmental cue which marks out a particular season to be important, I somehow carried in my heart a feeling mostly of secular indifference mixed with a dash of hope and trepidation as the start of Lent finally arrived.
The hope, it came from the fact that I had started to experience a little of God's grace in my life. Leading up to Lent, I had started to receive deeper personal revelations about the condition of my soul through the Sacraments of Confession. On the last week of February, right before my Chengdu trip, I found myself breaking down at the confession table, feeling a deep sorrow at my inability to love my son properly, for wishing him death in the dark hateful recesses of my heart. Why do I wish him death ? Because while I love him, and see him as my spiritual brethren, he is still immature in many aspects and we get into fights which leaves me in a lot of anguish. After the confession, I felt an inexplicably relief, as if to be lifted from the mire, that I can be forgiven for everything. I started to feel that I too can have a meaningful existence in spite of myself.
The trepidation, it came from having to give up all the good food during this upcoming fast. In my last Orthodox fast (the Nativity fast), I experienced quite a bit of lethargy and found that giving up meat to be more difficult than I expected it to be. The Sunday before Lent, I had a 'last meal' of some pancakes at Hoshino at Midvalley with my wife and kid, as a 'mourning' for my upcoming fast. I also decided around that time to also give up the internet except for work and spiritual matters. The Church Father's, they say that at Lent we are to give up 'eating' our brothers and sisters (i.e. consuming on their shame, misfortune and distress), without stopping the use of Internet, this would not be possible.
And so, after having tucked away my last meal, I stepped tentatively into first week of Lent...
The first 3 weeks of Lent: Discovering my humanity.
The first week of Lent is called the Clean Week, a week whereby those who are able to would fast from food for the entire Monday and only start re-eating slowly on Tuesday onward. I decided to give the full Monday fast a try and felt surprisingly energize this time around. Perhaps God's grace is in stronger me than it was during the Nativity fast. During Clean Week, there were also daily services at the church, both in the mornings and the evenings. The evening services were especially good for me, for it involved the reading of the Canon of St Andrew of Crete which had a lot of petitions/prostration to God about granting us more humility (something I struggle with).
During the first evening service, I had a spiritual breakthrough which left me weeping silently in the darken church. What was I weeping about ? It was the sight of a fellow lady parishioner cuddling with her small child under the faint glows of the warm church candle lights. Why would I weep at such a sight ? Previously I had noticed that I harbored an irrational racist sentiment towards her and had confessed about it generally at the confession table. However, it wasn't till my sin was reflected through the light of this precious and yet so fragile loving moment that the extent of my dehumanization of her only finally strike home. The revelation reduced me to a puddle of tears, I wept over my depravity.. (but also vaingloriously praise myself for my 'saintly' tears).
During the subsequent 3 weeks of Lent, I had a few other experiences likes this, where my more awaken heart would be able to perceive the true worth of things clearer. Things that would normally appear mundane and pass me by unnoticed. For example one night after service, I found the sight of my wife driving my son up the porch in our banged-up Myvi to be both achingly and hauntingly beautiful. At the time, she was wearing a Pikachu party hat and was looking slightly worn down, most likely from having given her motherly love to my son unreservingly. Something about the Pikachu hat and me not being able to be by her side that night made the image of her tiredness a tragically lonely but heroic one. I felt the windows of my heart open to the sorrows and plight of single mothers the world over, who had to break their backs to provide for their children without the support of a spouse. I don't know why I would feel like that. The way I perceived it, it was totally out of context, yet at the same time, it made a lot of sense and most importantly made me feel the need to love my family reverentially.
I also experienced these out-of-context feelings faintly at work when I saw an office couple sharing a private moment with each other. This sight, it created an emotional surge in me, it was as if my heart was telling me to pay attention to how their love stand as a testament against the brutal norms of the capitalistic workplace.
"Pay attention, you are a human being, not human capital nor a mindless consumer...", my heart was perhaps suggesting
Concurrently, during the evenings, I found myself waking up at 3 AM in the mornings with tingling sensations coursing through my body. I wonder if this is the operation of God's grace in me, the movements of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, the tingling sensation is accompanied by spiritual reflections, mostly regarding my own sins as a human being. I found myself crying silently some of the nights and falling back to sleep peacefully after. Perhaps this is the process of healing.
All these experiences, they reached a sort of a climatic resolution on the Friday of the 3rd week. On that day there was a service, and I attended it. It was also my birthday. As I entered church, a surge of emotions welled up in the bosom of my heart. Tears began to flow inexplicably, it was as if something was on the verge of bursting out, but I didn't know what it was or how to say it. I finally found the words at the confession table, I confessed in a flood of tears.
"I have lived 40 years as an animal, this year onward, I want to live as a human being", I said in a choking and sobbing voice.
The 3 weeks of sporadic spiritual experience, they culminated as the singular insight that I am not an animal, but a human being. An insight which in the dark times of modernity, is in fact quite revelatory (for myself at least). After the service, Father texted me links to the audio-book, "Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives" by Elder Thaddeus. I thank him and made a commitment to listen to it.
The 4th Week: Intermission
The 4th week passed by in a similar manner as in the 1st three weeks, but perhaps with less intensity for I couldn't recall anything specifically from the week now. I vaguely recall putting some of Elder Thaddeus' advice into use with my family and found it to be extremely helpful.
"Even if you so much think of your child as bad and in need of correction, you are giving him an unknown blow", Elder Thaddeus advice us. One has to be much less judgmental with his child and try to influence him with a much more loving internal disposition. I put this idea to practice and found being able to influence my son much better.
Another thing which I remembered from that week was a phrase from the sermon my Father gave on the Sunday of Saint John of the Ladder. In the sermon, he mentioned that "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" which St John wrote was not meant to be read by beginners and lay people as it was written for monks and those who are advanced in the spiritual journey. Personally, "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" was a special book for me, along with "The Way of the Pilgrim", "The Philokalia" and "Dairy of a Writer by Dostoevsky". I came across these book in the later part of 2022 and read a substantial portion of all of them. It was in these book that I found the conviction that the Orthodox Christians have within their possession the Truth of life. Within "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" , I found the idea that we are to learn to love 'dishonor' to be comforting and an antidote for my own obsessive vainglory and pride filled disposition. I had since found many other Orthodox books which were more suitable for my level (books written by more contemporary saints such as St Theophan, St Paisius etc..), but these 4 books, they have a special place in my heart, for without them, I would most likely have not find my way into the Orthodox church.
The 5th & 6th Week: Crossing an Ocean & Falling from Grace
The 5th week of Lent was a rather eventful one for me and I have summarize the experience in one of the blog post below. "Crossing an Ocean". It was essential a week where I came to terms with my own sins, made a public account of it and crucified myself on my own Golgotha, my own Cross.
In the 6th week of Lent, I started to feel a loss of grace. I believe that this happened because I found myself starting to become obsessed about my blogging. I had set out initially to write an honest apology/confession to my friends ("My struggle with the passions"), but as the praises come in, it began to infect my soul and started inflating my ego and robbing me of my peace. Soon, I found myself writing the "Crossing an Ocean" blog post, this time about my spiritual experience on the weekend of the 5th week. My heart, it felt inflamed by this blogging activity, and I lost the ability to perceive those transcendent truths nor write flowingly, semi-consciously. I became worried if my sentences were coming together well enough, if it will hit the high of the previous post. This loss of grace, it saddened me, but I wasn't fully conscious of it at the time, except that I knew I felt restless. At the end of the 6th week of Lent, things came to a head, and the spiritual dearth I felt throughout the week, it culminated with me blowing up at my son at the Church for creating a ruckus and causing inconvenience to other parishioners. I left Church service mid-way in an angry huff and felt embarrassed for myself and sad for my son. Later that afternoon however, through the infinite grace of God, things improved and my son had a spiritual breakthrough himself while we were eating deserts at the IPC mall.
He told me that he had experienced very little peace within himself and that he would like God's peace to be with him more. I asked him how was he going to acquire this peace and he found the answer for himself. He said that this required him to be one with God (theosis ?), to do His commandments. Later that evening I told him that since he made being one with God his life goal, I felt my usual parental rules and boundaries would no longer be adequate to guide him, and that I would withdraw them and instead only advice him as a 'brethren' on what he should do to acquire Godly peace which he himself wanted. Here I borrow a bit of St Paul's writing about how one has no need of the Law of Circumcision now if he has Christ. (Later on, I wonder whether I was too idealistic here, and have dialed back this a bit)
The 7th and Final Week: Coming Face to Face with My Original Sin
At the start of the final week of Lent, I was still very much in a state of spiritual angst from my obsession with the blog. Yet I decided not to stop it, I felt (delusionally ?) that maybe I have a gift here, and that I should try to continue and learn to write without obsessive attachment. I also felt that what I write will be useful to my son one day and also to the reader who is looking for spiritual answers to his own life too. These thoughts, they galvanized me and gave me fuel to retype the blog post "A window into a parents life" that I deleted out of disgust for all the vainglorious thoughts it was generating in me. I was at that time very close to abandoning this entire blogging project. I also took 2 days off to attend the Great Thursday and Great Friday services and hoped to recover myself during then.
By now, I had felt that while Great Lent started out well, it has now gone a bit down hill. I wasn't entirely discouraged by this fact because I had read from one of Met. Anthony Bloom's book that one shouldn't expect to be able to hold on to the Grace of God. That it will be taken away from us to teach us humility. I thus had little expectations for the final week except perhaps that I would try to get a grip on my vainglory and try to practice the virtue humility in the midst of this difficulty. Little did I know that my biggest spiritual breakthrough of the entire Lent was still lying ahead for me. As they say in Mandarin, "human plans are inferior to the plans of heaven" Indeed God had His plans for me, for without me realizing it He was about to reveal my 'original' sin to me. The sin which is so close to oneself that one cannot see it, the cardinal sin that engenders/catalyzed all the other sins. This insight, I now take away as a gift from God, for it was revealed to me in a manner which felt divinely guided. It is my most prized possession now, a final crowing treasure which I have gotten out of Lent.
The way I was led to this insight by divine providence happened like this...
On Thursday night, at the evening service, I found myself confronted with a horrible truth. As I was listening to the reading of the events of the Crucifixion, it dawned on me that I am one with the Pharisee, that I was enjoying their mocking of our Lord as He hanged silently on the cross.
"If you are God, please come down from the cross now", my heart snickered along with the Pharisee. I knew a part of me hated God, but I didn't know why. At this point now however, I have been doing confession seriously for around 5 months, and was practiced enough to be able to face this horribleness within me without sugar coating it, without flinching and looking away but instead to stare it in its face and acknowledge it as something I needed to repent of. And to have faith that it is not beyond the Lord to forgive me of something like this. And to have hope that he will reveal to me what I need to do.
After the service, I felt bad but not entirely disturbed, not as disturbed as much as being plagued by the slings and arrows of vainglorious impulses. The next day, Great Friday itself, I went to church in the morning and after service, Father reminded us to attend the evening services for there will be a presentation and procession of the burial shroud of our Lord. It was going to be an evening funeral service, probably the most special and solemn day of the entire year. I was determine to be there on time today. But things didn't turn out as expected, God's other plan was in motion and by a confluence and string of minor events that occurred in succession, I found myself late, despite my best human attempt not to be.
So what happened ? What was the gentle gust of wind that the flutters of the butterfly wing produced to cause a subsequent hurricane. Well... it was something small and seemingly innocuous, I had forgotten to do the laundry before going to morning service, a household work which my wife had asked me to help with the previous night, somehow it just completely slipped my mind. After I got back home, I was reminded by my wife of this unfulfilled promise. Feeling guilty, I immediately leap from my seat and went to get it done. After the laundry was done, I proceeded to hang the clothes on the rack outside for it to dry, thinking I had put away this accident behind me. However, disaster struck, I fell asleep while reading some spiritual books on my phone and it started to rain outside, wetting the laundry. My wife had reminded to bring the clothes in case it rained as she couldn't do it, having to attend to some business call. When she came down after her call to find the clothes wet, something in her broke, she lost her cool and scolded me for this particular negligence but also other things which I tend to slip up on. Normally she would have not be so frustrated, but today she couldn't keep her cool due to the fact that her project was giving her quite a bit of stress and she was also physically unwell. She told me that somehow I didn't not care about the house, that I cared about our son and her, but not the house. While I nodded my head, inside I was resistant, and chalked it up to her being emotional.
"I've cared and sacrificed my self plenty", the hard parts in me was saying.
In general, me and my wife fight very little, so every argument rends and tears the heart. Though I didn't really agree I did something wrong (after all I am just a bit forgetful mah...) I still felt the need to make up to her. I decided to redo the laundry and also fetch her to my in-laws house so that she did not need to drive herself. She had been working hard on her project all week long, and I felt that it was the least I could do to not make her feel neglected. At this time, I also thought maybe I should skip the night service if my wife finished work late, because by the time I fetch her to the in-law house, perhaps three quarter of the service would have been over. It would be a great loss, but maybe it's better to miss the service after all..
"Didn't I enjoy seeing Christ being nailed at the cross, maybe if I go to the burial service, I would be blaspheming Christ in my heart ", I wondered.
I also remembered that one of the Saints did say that before church, we have to take care of our spouse. Just at the time I was toying with these ideas, a Christian friend of mind texted me to wish me Happy Great Friday. I confided with him my problems, and he basically helped me feel OK with my decision to stay at home with my wife.
"God will understand", he told me something to that effect.
However, I got to go to the church after all as my wife managed to finish her work at 6:00 PM that night and so I had a chance to attend the service before it was too late. I thought I could potentially keep to my original promise of attending the service on time. But by the time I was done fetching her, it was already 6:30 PM and I found that I had only 30 mins to get to the Church if I wanted to make it before service start. The afternoon rain which caused me to redo my laundry, it didn't help me in this situation either, for it created a heavy traffic jam leading into downtown KL where the church was located. Somehow, I became very anxious and frustrated as I tried to weave and cut my way through the jam. For some reason, I felt a great loss about something which not that long ago I was thinking wasn't that important. I felt a pain in me that I was going to miss the burial of my Lord, to miss His last earthly moment. It produced anguish within me.
It was during being stuck in this jam and being in this despair, that my epiphany came to me. Suddenly, I realized.. this seemingly little thing, this "accidentally" forgetting the laundry and "accidentally" falling asleep which had caused me to miss my Lord's burial, it is not something small at all, it is my original sin. The sin I grew up with, the sin which has hid in the shadows of my unresolved childhood memories of how I was a victim in a world which was unfair to me. Suddenly, a whole series of past experience got re-arranged within my minds eye into a new picture. I experienced a gestalt shift in my perspective, like how one experiences in those visual illusions where you can see an image to be both either a young lady or an old lady depending on how your subconscious frames it.
Intuitively, I realized now, it was this "accidentally not paying attention" at primary school that my relationship with my parents soured. It was this "accidentally not paying attention" that led me to accept all things indiscriminately (pornography included). I realize what my problem was, I was fundamentally a slothful and lazy person, and more particularly, I was lazy with the way I manage my attention. I realized it was entirely my choice me to be like that, that I could have addressed it at any time in my life, but which I instead chose to ignore, to paper over my laziness with a prideful excuse that I was too spiritual to care about worldly matters. I was in short an ignorant person, an pompous ignoramus... And this was my downfall...
Upon arriving at church, I knew I had an epiphany that I had to digest (perhaps for the rest of my life), but at the time, I was too restless to process properly. I was more concerned with not being able to join my Lord's funeral and was simultaneously thankful to Him for revealing to me that I in fact care deeply about Him, and that my hate, it was probably mingled up with this blindness I had over my original sin.
After the service, I went to fetch my wife and son home. I could feel she was still upset with me (for I made another couple of "accidental" mistakes that send a signal to her that I didn't care enough). Within my heart, the rip seemed to widen a bit more and I felt disturbed and unable to feel or think about anything except wondering how to patch things up. (Is this how everyone feels when they fight with their spouses?). I felt that the Lord was reinforcing the message to me as if to show me how a "bit of carelessness" can lead to the destruction of the world.
On Saturday morning, I attended services and felt relieve to be given a piece of Holy Bread by Matushka. I had the intuition that this Bread will help sustain me throughout the weekend before communion. I felt as if the demons were prowling at the gates, waiting for the chance to rob the final day of Easter from me. Besides getting into trouble with wife, I was also dealing with another spiritual battle, but ones that are not meant to be shared here...
When I got home, I found that things has lighten up between me and my wife, and I was determine to on guard for the day, trying to hold the Jesus prayer within me and also trying to be vigilant and not to be 'careless' around my family, not to take them for granted. I started seeing more of what needed to be done at home and felt I had made some progress immediately already.
But again at night my "carelessness" struck again. I forgot to check with Father if I needed to fast before the midnight communion. I went to church and asked, and was crestfallen to be told that indeed that I needed to, and that I couldn't commune with my Lord as I ate my dinner to close to communion time. This was the second time I was blocked from my Lord due to my own carelessness. The message got driven home even further. I felt like I was one of the foolish virgins banging at the closed gates. The oil that I didn't have in my lamp ? It was vigilance, it was the respect for the sanctity of my God given power of attention.
Father told that I can still go for communion on the Easter Sunday morning services, but I was properly paranoid now. And indeed, the paranoia was warranted. On Sunday, due to other mishaps (but this time not because of my "laziness"), I almost missed the Holy Communion with my son, but was glad to finally succeed in doing so. The rest of the Sunday, it went as it should. After Easter, there was a celebration at the Trapeze, and I was finally able to eat meat again. During the night, I went to dinner with the in-laws, I was quite strung up now from events of the past few days and was low on spiritual fuel by now. I was able to treat everyone cordially and nicely but not anything more.
The Week After: To be a Good Servant
All in, the entire Easter had been a very eventful one for myself, a journey that somehow parallels Christ own final journey through his earthly life. I felt my own version of the triumphal entry, reclaiming my humanity, felt my own crucifixion in exposing my own shame, descend into a Hades of vainglorious suffering and experience a resurrection as man who has reconciled with his childhood unhappiness. As I step out of Great Lent, I find myself looking forward to working with our Good Lord to root out the slothful disposition within myself and to become a more faithful servant to do His work. To bring more like me (fallen publicans, thief and harlots) to the shores of salvation. With our Lord, who has trampled down death by death, all is possible.
Christ is Risen ! Христос воскрес !
