Posts
Dear Parish Faithful,
Sabbath, the day of Creation, the day of [the goodness of] “this world,” became—in Christ—the day of expectation, the day before the Lord’s Day....
[Saturday is] a day of feast and a day of death. It is a feast because it is in this world and in its time that Christ overcame death and inaugurated his kingdom, because his incarnation, death, and Resurrection are the fulfillment of creation in which God rejoiced at the beginning. It is a day of death because in Christ’s death the world died, and its salvation, fulfillment, and transfiguration are beyond the grave, in the “age to come.”...
During Lent this meaning of Saturdays acquires a special intensity, for the purpose of Lent is precisely to recover the Christian meaning of time as preparation and pilgrimage and of the status of the Christian as “alien” and “exile” in this world (1 Peter 2.11). These Saturdays refer to the lenten effort to the future fulfillment and thus give Lent its special rhythm. On the one hand, Saturday in Lent is a “eucharistic” day marked by the celebration of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, and Eucharist always means feast. The peculiar character of that feast, however, is that it refers to Lent itself as journey, patience, and effort and thus becomes a “stopover” whose purpose is to make us reflect on the ultimate goal of that journey.
—Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent
_____
A wonderful passage from Fr. Alexander on this "Memorial Saturday," on which we are commemorating our departed loved ones.
