By Jessica Ryder-Khalil

Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!  In the Orthodox Church we have recently completed our annual Lenten Fast and Holy Week leading to the Feast of the Resurrection.  Now we enter a new season, a new life.  I love the joyful hymns and processions of this liturgical season.  It is a heart-warming reminder of the great and eternal reconciliation between heaven and earth, God and man when the children carry their banners high singing, “He abolished the gates of brass and broke asunder the bars of iron; and brought out His chosen ones with rejoicing and with joy.”  This is the completion of Christian life- freedom from sin and death and everlasting joy in the victory of Christ our King.   The Holy Fifty Days is a time of joy where the old has been made new.   However, that transition between the Lenten period and the Pentecostal period is one where I personally struggle.  I regularly feel like Lent and Holy Week patch up the cracks and holes in my spiritual boat, only to capsize when the waves change direction.        

Here’s why: as sinners full of passions, everything from vainglory and anger to gluttony and sloth, we spend the weeks of Lent sweeping up our house and putting things in order–only to seemingly let the genie out of the bottle during the Holy Fifty Days.  I fear for my soul that my last condition may be worse than the first.  For whom among us celebrates the Resurrection Feast with calm, sober joy once that table of meats and rich desserts is in front of us?  For whom among us, when we’ve striven to moderate our thoughts and emotions through Lent does not find themselves slipping back into old habits once our guard is down?  We read in the Gospel of St. Matthew, “When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none.  Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came’.” (Matthew 12:43-45)

Yet again, I proclaim “Christ truly is risen” and has given us authority to trample serpents and scorpions, the very personal internal reptiles in the basement of our souls, as described by St. Theresa of Avila in The Interior Castle. She writes of the first or outer mansions of spiritual practice, “The number of snakes, vipers, and venomous reptiles from outside the castle prevent souls entering them from seeing the light. They resemble a person entering a chamber full of brilliant sunshine, with eyes clogged and half closed with dust” (Chapter 2, Paragraph 15).  For St. Theresa, the person who has begun to practice prayer must continue ever onward through the mansions, aware that there will be vipers waiting throughout the chambers. “For the creatures amongst whom we dwell are so venomous, so vicious, and so dangerous, that it is almost impossible to avoid being tripped up by them” (Chap 2, Section 2, Paragraph 4).  Escape from these beasts is possible by heeding the call of the Lord to draw nearer to Him. The blessed mother of nuns describes the Lord as a loving, compassionate Neighbor who never ceases to invite us into His home to enjoy His company and protection.  

By sharing this reflection, I admit that I barely have passed from St. Theresa’s first mansion to the second.  Barely a beginner in spiritual practice is one who is so easily shaken by a plate of food or other worldly pleasure.  Fortunately, I found sound advice about benefiting from the flow of liturgical seasons from fasting to feasting by reading The Festal Letters of St. Athanasius and, praise be to God, I might be beginning to see through the glass darkly.   A key to reading the letters announcing the dates for the Great Lent, Holy Week, and the Resurrection Feast is to realize that the Alexandrian patriarchs sent out these encyclicals to give greetings for the feast before the fast had even begun.  Therefore, we enter the Great Lent in expectation of the joy of the feast, and we celebrate the Resurrection Feast being tempered and recreated by the fast.    

Just as we still call the Passion Week the Pascha or Passover, St. Athanasius’ thought regarding the forty-day fast and Holy Week is intimately tied to the passage from 1 Corinthians 5:7-8:  “For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.  Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

St. Athanasius provides a thorough treatment of the Exodus typology, as about a quarter of the Festal Letters make reference to the transformation of the Jewish Passover into the redemptive Passion of Jesus Christ. In Letter XIV, he writes, “Therefore, let us too, when we come to the feast…let us hasten as if to the Lord, for the feast is ready, not thinking of it as pleasure and enjoyment for the belly, but as a manifestation of virtue.”  St. Athanasius continues with the Pauline thought that our spiritual food is virtuous action and sincere worship.  That is our feast- rejoicing in the presence of the Lord, honoring Him with righteous living empowered by the grace of His Spirit. As the faithful move toward Him through their inclination towards virtue, He Himself can “walk among us and eat with us the Passover while also promising us the true Passover and the joy in heaven with the saints” (Letter XIV). 

As much as I participate in the fast and subsequent feast of Passover, I also receive the blessing of new life both now and in anticipation of the age to come, walking in blameless and righteous joy. In this search for joy, I’m so thankful for Phoebe’s audiobook edition of Putting Joy into Practice because I regularly need the reminder that the Holy Fifty Days is best expressed in sharing the joy of the Resurrection with others through prayer, praise, and acts of service.   Phoebe writes, “Our joy will be complete when we ask from him all we need to live the joy of the Resurrection.” The Great Lent helps us put off worldly cares and the joy of the Holy Fifty Days fills that newly created space in our hearts with the love of God.  This ebb and flow of the liturgical seasons is to be embraced and relaxed into like floating on water, buoyed by the waves, shaped by the living water.      

Life returns to normal after Holy Week, a week where more time is spent at church than at home.  Everything was put on hold so that our family could walk to the Cross with Christ, descend to Hades with Him on Bright Saturday and be resurrected with Him on the Feast. The aftermath of breaking from our daily routines is apparent as I open the front door of our home and reality hits. The children must go back to school. My husband must go to work. There are six or seven loads of laundry and a sink overflowing with dishes waiting for me. The heaviness of the world comes crashing in with all its force. Illness and death do not stop. Suffering and difficulty do not stop. My unruly passions do not stop. 

But they are transformed, and we need to grasp onto that definitive change just as St. Thomas needed to see the Lord.  So on the Eighth Day, I will return to the blessed altar and confess, “I believe, I believe, I believe!” As St. Athanasius writes in Letter VI, “The entire creation keeps the feast, my brethren… on account of the enemies’ destruction, and of our salvation.  And rightly so: For if there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, what would there not be over the abolition of sin and the resurrection of the dead?  What a feast! And how great heaven’s joy!”

*The author quotes from an edition of the Festal Letters of St. Athanasius recently translated by David Brakke and David Gwynn. A free version of the Festal Letters in an older translation can also be accessed here.

Jessica Ryder-Khalil is a frequent contributor to Being in Community. She is a wife and mom of four children between the ages of 16 and 7 years of age.  She is a servant at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Gainesville, FL and is working towards an MTS degree from St. Athanasius & St. Cyril Theological School.  Jessica was baptized into the Coptic Orthodox Church 18 years ago and is a continual learner along the path to Orthodoxy. Before family life took the lead role, Jessica taught English as a Second Language both abroad and in the USA. Her previous posts include Shortbread Theology, Death, Roses, and Resurrection, An Hour in a Few Minutes, Spiritual Warfare Everywhere, and What My Mom Taught Me About Authenticity. Text © Jessica Ryder-Khalil, 2024.

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