Great Lent is the forty-day season of fasting, prayer, and repentance that prepares us for Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, the Resurrection of Christ. It starts on Clean Monday and ends just before Holy Week. We’re not just remembering what happened two thousand years ago. We’re entering into Christ’s death and resurrection ourselves.
The Church calls it “Great” because it’s the longest and most intense fast of the year. But it’s not great because it’s hard. It’s great because of where it takes us.
Why Forty Days?
Christ fasted forty days in the wilderness before beginning His ministry. Israel wandered forty years in the desert before entering the Promised Land. We fast forty days before entering the joy of Pascha. The number matters because it connects us to this pattern of preparation, testing, and transformation that runs through Scripture.
But here’s what trips people up coming from Protestant backgrounds: Lent isn’t about proving anything to God. It’s not earning your way into Easter. We’re being healed, not graded. The fasting, the extra services, the stepping back from entertainment, these are medicine, not requirements for God’s approval.
What We Actually Do
The fasting is stricter than most people expect. We abstain from meat, dairy, fish, wine, and oil. Some weeks are more intense than others. The first week is traditionally the strictest, with some people fasting completely on Clean Monday and eating only uncooked foods the first few days. Wednesdays and Fridays throughout Lent are particularly strict.
And yes, this is hard if you work rotating shifts at the plants or offshore. The Church knows this. Talk to your priest about how to keep the fast in your circumstances. A roughneck on a twelve-hour turnaround isn’t expected to fast like a monk in a monastery. But everyone is expected to struggle a little, to feel the hunger, to remember we don’t live by bread alone.
The services change completely during Lent. We use the Triodion, a special liturgical book filled with hymns of repentance. The Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts happens on Wednesday and Friday evenings, a service that doesn’t exist outside of Lent, where we receive Communion consecrated the previous Sunday. The priest wears dark vestments. The music shifts to a minor key. Everything slows down.
There’s also the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, read over the first week, a long, beautiful, exhausting service where we hear the entire story of salvation history and see ourselves in every failure and every hope. Your knees will hurt. That’s part of it.
It’s Not Just About Food
Lent has three pillars: fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. If you’re just skipping cheese but still scrolling social media for two hours a night and ignoring the guy at work who needs help, you’re missing the point. The fasting is supposed to create space. Space for prayer. Space for noticing people. Space for God.
We’re after something the Fathers call theosis, becoming by grace what Christ is by nature. That’s the goal of the Christian life, and Lent is when we get serious about it. We’re training. Building spiritual muscle. Learning to say no to ourselves so we can say yes to God.
This is different from how Catholics do Lent, by the way. They start on Ash Wednesday. We start on Clean Monday. Their Lent is forty days not counting Sundays. Ours is forty straight days, then Holy Week on top of that. And our fasting rules come straight from the ancient monastic tradition, we’re all called to fast like monks during this season, as much as we’re able.
The Rhythm of Preparation
Great Lent doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. The Church prepares us with three pre-Lenten Sundays: the Publican and Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Last Judgment. Then Forgiveness Sunday, when we ask forgiveness from everyone in the parish before Lent begins. That service ends in the evening with Forgiveness Vespers, and when it’s over, the priest changes into dark vestments right there. Lent has begun.
Then we walk through these forty days toward Palm Sunday, when we wave palms and sing “Hosanna,” knowing what’s coming next. Holy Week is its own thing, the most intense week of the year, when we live through Christ’s Passion day by day, service by service. And then, after all of it, Pascha explodes like sunrise after a long night.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote that Lent is a “bright sadness.” That’s exactly right. It’s hard, but it’s not depressing. There’s something clean about it. Something clarifying. You’ll probably feel it most in the third or fourth week, when the initial enthusiasm wears off and you’re just doing it, just showing up, just saying your prayers even though you don’t feel anything. That’s when the real work happens.
If you’ve never experienced an Orthodox Lent, you can’t quite imagine it from the outside. It takes over everything. The whole parish is fasting together, praying together, struggling together. Come to Presanctified on a Wednesday night and you’ll see what I mean. We’re all hungry, all tired, all trying. And somehow that’s exactly where we need to be.
