Great and Holy Lent is the Church's 40-day period of preparation for its greatest feast--the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It is the annual period that calls us back to God--a time of reflection and repentance. While no two families ready themselves during Great and Holy Lent exactly alike, there are time-tested spiritual disciplines the Church prescribes in order to direct our senses to God's presence.

The spiritual-cognitive component of anger were long recognized by our Church Holy Fathers, Saint Basil the Great recognized the loss of reason in anger. "It makes a man completely bestial...in fact, it does not even allow him to be a man at all, because he no longer has the help of his reason."

This is a psalm of repentance and God's mercy, and a prophecy about salvation through baptism (vv. 2, 7). Of all 150 psalms, this is the one most used in Holy Orthodox Church. It is a psalm of repentance said three times daily--Orthros (Matins), Third Hour, and Compline--as well as in every Divine Liturgy, where it is recited by the Orthodox priest as s sign of repentance while he censes before the Great Entrance.

On the first Sunday of Great and Holy Lent is the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the triumph of the only true and authentic Church of Christ our Lord and Savior. The theme of this Sunday since 843 A.D. has been that of the victory of the holy icons. In that year the iconoclastic controversy, which had raged on and off since 726 A.D., was finally laid to rest, and holy icons and their veneration were restored on the first Sunday of Great and Holy Lent. Since then, this Sunday has been commemorated as the "Triumph of Orthodoxy."

"Rejoicing today in the triumph of Orthodoxy on this first Sunday of Lent, we joyfully commemorate three events: one event belonging to the past; one event to the present; and one event which still belongs to the future."

Rejoicing today in the triumph of Orthodoxy on this first Sunday of Lent, we joyfully commemorate three events: one event belonging to the past; one event to the present; and one event which still belongs to the future.