Holy and Great Saturday

From Pascha to Pascha
The forty-day Holy Lent is our path to a new life given forth by Pascha. I know many brethren, who practice fasting with ecclesiastical attention, and when it ends, they feel great distress. How is this distress to be treated? How can it not turn, in us, into (our) remaining fixed in what has passed or into sloth or bitterness? The answer is in the constant awareness that fasting, whose form ends in the feast, its spirit is supposed to continue beyond it, that is, its victories that led us to Pascha are to continue in us. To strive in prayer, both communal and individual, in fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays (no fasting from Pascha till its apodosis), in reading the Word and leading the life of obedience and love that is a witness to the world…, this is what this long preparation, that ends tomorrow, anticipates. May this fast be, for us, an exercise in a life which is directed towards the last Pascha.