The Summit of Great Lent: What Should We Strive For?

Spiritual Advice of Metropolitan Anthony (Pakanich) for the Great Lent:

The Great Lent is the time when our wishes come true. Did you know that?

We have to appreciate clearly how this amazing possibility materializes and deal with it accordingly.

The summit of a person’s spiritual life as a whole, and not just of the Lent, is a prayer fulfilled by the Creator. What does it mean?

A fulfilled prayer implies that our plans and God’s expectations have coincided. In other words, we have guessed God’s plan for us correctly. It is the most wonderful thing that we may have in life!

A correctly guessed plan, a felt-through motive, and a fulfilled prayer: these are marvelous coincidences, which the Creator has sent us for a reason.

Let’s go back to the coming Great Lent. In fact, a fasting season is a special time that gives unique chances for us to achieve supreme goals and aims in comparison with any other season.

Why? That is because we are especially diligent, focused, and organized at that time. You can compare it with an animal, which is ready for a decisive and swift leap.

We do our best to prayerfully tune in to God’s frequency during the Lent. We do our best to keep it alive, protecting this fantastic melody from alien and out-of-tune sounds that come from the outside. Ideally, we begin to vibrate on the same frequency, too. That is how our prayerful communication with God goes on.

God’s energies permeate us thanks to our unity with the Creator, adding a new meaning, power, and color to our thoughts and desires, renewing them to match the high and clear pitch that they try to attune to.

I wish all of us to get stronger in the right desires, which will flow out from our personal experience of communication with God during this Great Lent. The Lord is near and accessible, though at the same time, He is infinitely inscrutable and far. This paradox contains our salvation.

“There is a secret and close connection established between man and God. There isn’t anything like that connection among people. However, there is a greater distance between the two parties, too. We don’t interact with the Totally Other (it’s meaningless). Instead, we interact with the Unfathomably and Unbearably Other. We’ve got to feel our intimate connection with him and our infinite distance simultaneously.” (C. S. Lewis)

Recorded by Natallia Goroshkova
Translated by The Catalog of Good Deeds

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