My beloved spiritual children in Christ Our Only True God and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST! HE WAS, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE. Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ.
A SONG OF REPENTANCE: THE GREAT CANON OF SAINT ANDREW OF CRETE
The Monastery of Axion Estin
SOURCE: The Monastery of Axion Estin
Introduction
The experience of Lent is a spiritual journey whose purpose is to transfer us from one spiritual state to another, a dynamic passage. For this reason the Church commences Lent with the great penitential Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete. This penitential lamentation conveys to us the scope and depth of sin, shaking the soul with despair, repentance, and hope.
The only times it is appointed to be read in church are the first four nights of Great and Holy Lent (clean Monday through to clean Thursday), and fourth sections of each ode are read at Great Compline) and at Matins (Orthros) for Thursday of the Fifth Week of Great and Holy Lent, when it is read in its entirety (in this latter service, the entire life of Saint Mary of Egypt is also read).
This complex poem (actually a chanted hymn) was written in the early 700's, and it picked up the adjective "great" for two reasons: it is extra-long (about 250 verses), and it is majestic. It is a liturgical poem consisting of Nine Odes. The Great Canon was written by Saint Andrew of Crete, a bishop who was initially a monk in Jerusalem.
The whole Canon is a kind of "Walk Through the Bible". Saint Andrew begins with Adam and Eve and goes all the way through, exhorting himself by applying the stories and characters of the Holy Bible. Reading the Canon helps us see how Christians in the Holy Land, 1,300 years ago, understood the Holy Scripture. It is a way to time-travel, and actually joins them in these ancient Christian devotions which are part of the dynamic life of the Church.
Father Alexander Schmemann says about the 'great Canon of repentance' that: "...with a unique art, Saint Andrew interwove the great biblical themes--Adam and Eve, Paradise and the Fall, the Patriarchs, Noah and the Flood, David, the Promised Land, and ultimately Christ and the Church--with confession of sin and repentance. The events of sacred history are revealed as events in my life, God's acts in the past as acts aimed at me and my salvation, the tragedy of sin and betrayal as my personal tragedy. My life is shown to me as part of the great and all embracing fight between God and the powers of darkness which rebel against Him."
Of the Canon, Father Alexander, continues: "The Canon begins on a deeply personal note...One after another, my sins are revealed in their deep connection with the continuous drama of man's relation to God; the story of man's fall is my story."
Father Alexander goes on to say that these stories from Holy Scripture are so much more than merely allegories. He reminds us that even though we are each unique persons, we are all moving through the same drama. We all face choices that through the ages others have faced before us and just as we must choose the sacred pathway to return to God so they had to choose; and in their choosing have much to teach us, to remind us, to reveal to us the tried and tested path to life. And it is in this way that my own and deeply personal sin becomes the lens through which I can begin to grasp the real importance of His redemptive acts.
Part of the reason that we are so vividly lukewarm in the faith, according to Father Alexander, is that we are too much concerned with things of the world, and we fail to remember the true heights from which we fell from grace as sons and daughters of Adam. This is something that is common to all mankind through the ages, but Father Alexander adds another element to this that brings it closer to the reality of contemporary life. He says: "Sin...is thought of primarily as a natural "weakness" due usually to maladjustment, which has in turn social roots and, therefore, can be eliminated by a better social and economic organization. For this reason even when he confesses his sins, the modern man no longer repents...[he] shares his problems with the confessor--expecting from religion some therapeutic treatment which will make him happy again and well-adjusted."
However, the great Canon, says Father Alexander, reintroduces us to the Truth about sin and our sinfulness. It directs us back to the culture of Creation, Fall, and Redemption where we may have some chance at once again to recall our experience and existential failures within our life, therefore repentance from sin is: "...the shock of man who, seeing in himself the "image of the ineffable glory," realizes that he has defiled, betrayed and rejected it in his life; repentance as regret coming from the ultimate depth of man's consciousness; as the desire to return; as surrender to God's love and mercy...[allows confession to become] meaningful only if sin is understood and experienced in all of its depth and sadness," as the rejection of communion with God.
Unfortunately, the culture in which we live excludes the concept of sin or distorts its notion in relation to the biblical and Christian Tradition. For if sin is, first of all, humanity's fall from an incredibly high altitude, the rejection by humanity of its 'high calling', what can all this mean within a culture which ignores and denies that 'high altitude' and 'calling', and defines a human not from 'above' (according to the image and likeness of God) but from 'below' (according to mere biology or physiology). Sadly this culture we live in thinks of human life only in terms of material goods and thus ignores the fact that human beings have a transcendental vocation.
The biblical and Christian Tradition of sin has a depth and density which the culture in which we live is simply unable to comprehend and which makes confession of sins something very different from True Christian Repentance. For this reason the great Canon reminds and teaches us that the ground that we need to walk in order to return to anything resembling the "image of the ineffable glory" is a field that we too often leave uncultivated and neglected. For most of us, locked into the familiarity of institutionalized, rule bound, and well worn praxis the simple words of the Canon which have so much to do with acts of self-denial and obedience, are a wilderness of exceptionally rich and unfamiliar ground, in the culture in which we live and which shapes our world-view.
(To be continued)
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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!"--Saint John Chrysostom
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With sincere agape in His Holy Diakonia,
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+Father George