This Bright Sadness

Did you know that in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Lent is called the Season of Bright Sadness? It's an expression that, as one website remarks, "attests to the tenor and labor of the season."

Lent is a season of mourning, but one in which grief is lightened by the anticipation of joy to come. Lent's necessary end at Easter means that Christ's Resurrection on that Sunday works its retrograde effect on the 40 days previous, illuminating agony with glory, despair with celebration.

The Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann rebukes our forgetfulness of Resurrection Hope, in this Lenten season:

Anyone who has, be it only once, taken part in that night which is “brighter than the day,” who has tasted of that unique joy, knows it. On Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and live by it. . . Is it not our daily experience, however, that this faith is very seldom ours, that all the time we lose and betray the “new life” which we received as a gift, and that in fact we live as if Christ did not rise from the dead, as if that unique event had no meaning whatsoever for us? We simply forget all this — so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations — and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes “old” again — petty, dark, and ultimately meaningless — a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end.

At the moment, I seem to be drowning in sorrow and sickness: both my own and sharing in others'. Blown apart by a whirling confusion of misunderstandings, misarticulations, misplacements, misadventures, mistakes and miseries. They are, perhaps, all to common to the experience of being human in a broken world. But nevertheless stinging, in their immediacy. And so I am thankful for this Lenten Season, that comes so early this year.

I step into the dark, already a late-comer to the Time. My individual, petty, first world agonies are caught up in the Great Mourning. I lay down the griefs of those I love, in supplication and trust. I need not fear, for I know that in these days of weakness of I shall meet my Lord, who bore the Cross.

Recently I discovered this exclamation:

The night may be dark and long, but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon. “Do not deprive us of our expectation, O Lover of man!” - Alexander Schmemann.

It's become a prayer for me:

Do not deprive us of our expectation! I yell, over and over.

And I know my prayers are answered:

For as many as are the promises of God, they are 'Yes' in Christ. And so through him our 'Amen', to the glory of God. (2 Corinthians 1:20)