Healing of the Time

Great Lent is an openness towards eternity, a restoration of the time that was broken by Adam. God had created Man to live forever. Adam sinned. He became mortal. His sin had broken his time; it became finite. This is what Christ is come to heal us from. Fasting came to be so that we get used to the fact that God wills us to be with Him forever. Let us consider, for instance, the subjects of the Sundays of Lent. The first Sunday is for the triumph of the icon. This belongs to the theology of eternity; this is a revelation of the eternal life for which God has prepared us. This is followed by the Sunday of Gregory Palamas who had taught about the uncreated Light, the Eternal Light, the eternal time into which we enter here and now. Then comes the Sunday of the Cross which is followed by the commemoration of a couple of hermits (John of the Ladder and Mary of Egypt) who had said, through their lives, that life is a cross, that is, it consists of facing, henceforth, the Kingdom of eternity. Lent, this is our training to the fact that we belong to eternity!