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GREAT LENT: Day One
Nostalgia for Paradise
The Sunday Before Great Lent is called Cheesefare Sunday, because we begin to fast from dairy products after this day. But another theme is the "Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise." There is a wonderful hymn from the Great Vespers that unfolds that theme with both rich imagery, "compunction" (Gk. katanuxis) and spiritual insight:
Adam was cast out of Paradise through eating the tree. Seated before the gates he wept, lamenting with a pitiful voice and saying: 'Woe is me, what have I suffered in my misery! I transgressed one commandment of the Master, and now I am deprived of every blessing. O most holy Pardise, planted for my sake and now shut up, pray to Him that made thee and fashioned me, that once more I may take pleasure in thy flowers.' Then the Savior said to him: 'I desire not the loss of the creature which I fashioned, but that he should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth; and when he comes to me I will not cast him out.
Apostikha from Great Vespers of the Sunday Before Great Lent
The Future Life and the Body
It is perhaps most obvious during Great Lent just how much our bodies participate in the very act of worship. We will soon be making prostrations and bowing deeply at the waist; services during which we do our best to stand are somewhat longer, and so forth. Of course, that is the "outward person" and not yet the "inward person." Those very practices can be lifeless if done somewhat mechanically. Yet, the point I am trying to make her very briefly is that we need to respect our "bodily nature" as integral to our very humanity. That this is expressive of a holistic Orthodox anthropology at its most complete. These are simply a few comments which are meant to preface a passage from the book Theology of the Body by the French Orthodox theologian, Jean-Claude Larchet. His book is a very thorough examination of the many-sided approaches to the human body and its relation to the "soul" and/or "spirit" which are essential for us to understand to fully grasp our understanding and experience of human nature as created by God. The passage here is a nice summary of the over-all teaching of the Church on the body:
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The fact remains that original, authentic Christianity is, by its very nature, the one religion that values the body most of all. This is seen in the doctrine of creation, whereby the body too is deemed to be made in the image of God. Similarly, Christianity's portrayal of future life is one in which the body is also called to participate. Indeed, it is seen in its conception of the human person as composed inextricably of soul and body, and who thus does not simply have a body but in part is a body, marked by all its spiritual qualities. Without question, such exceptional value and significance accord the body is lined to the very basis of Christianity - namely, the incarnation. It is a consequence of the fact that the Son of God became man, assuming not simply a human soul but a human body; that in this body he experienced what we experience; that in his person he delivered it from its weaknesses and ills, making it incorruptible, granting it eternal life; and that he gave it as food to his disciples and believers, making them partakers of his divinity, and of all associated blessing.
Theology of the Body, p. 11, by Jean-Claude Larchet
