Bright Sadness

Slowly, reluctantly, in a world where there is already so much suffering and sacrifice, especially in Ukraine at the moment, the fast of Great Lent this year has approached not without some dread perhaps. But in dread of what we shall give up we must not overlook what we gain: Lent is a time of such splendid and diverse liturgical riches--the Canon of St. Andrew, the Akathist hymn, the life of St. Mary of Egypt, the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, and crowning it all the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy.

As we begin to think on our forty days in the desert, I draw your attention to something I wrote three years ago about making fasting perhaps a bit more practicable in our own day. 

I also reprint something I wrote on here more than five years ago now, offering some very rich readings as we prepare for, and then enter into, the mystery of the Lord's passover. 

Perhaps my favourite of his Alexander Schmemann's books, which every year I re-read at this time, is Great Lent: Journey to Pascha (SVS Press, 1974), 140pp.

This book, I think, is Schmemann at his best: serious but light, indeed lyrical; never letting the season of penitence and the tears of sorrow overwhelm the joy of knowing that Christ's Pascha has already happened, that death has been defeated, and that life will be given to those in the tombs.

One year I read the above work with his then just-released Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, and you can see in these latter reflections how much he loved the Lenten season and how he could, in spite of it all, never fail to see that Pascha really does stand at the heart of everything.

There are other books that come to mind here as well: Frederica Mathewes-Greene, First Fruits of Prayer: A Forty Day Journey Through the Canon of St. Andrew (Paraclete Press, 2006, 195pp.).

If you are not celebrating the Penitential Canon of St. Andrew of Crete in your parish, or cannot attend, then her little book is a good way of reading a short passage from the canon for each of the forty days. 

Lev Gillet's book The Year of Grace of the Lord: A Scriptural and Liturgical Commentary on the Calendar of the Orthodox Church also has much good food for thought in meditating on the liturgical cycle of Lent, and in offering practical recommendations for askesis in addition to the customary fasting.

Equally edifying is the little book by the prolific pastoral theologian and Orthodox priest William Mills: The Prayer of St. Ephrem: A Biblical Commentary, on which I commented previously, and whose author I have interviewed several times about his other books.

Similarly, this splendid CD is a wonderful resource if you are on the road a lot or sitting at your desk: Have Mercy on Me, O God: The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete (Schola Cantorum of St. Peter the Apostle). Under the expert direction of J. Michael Thompson, this schola's rendering of the canon is sublime. I received from Thompson a version of the Liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified gifts performed by the Schola under his direction. I have to confess that its lovely prostopinije setting has forced me to reconsider a chant system I had previously considered a poor cousin to the Galician and Kyivan. (This latter CD is available from the Sisters of St. Basil in Uniontown, PA.)

For those who want a serious scholarly understanding of the liturgical heart of Lent as it were, the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy, see Stefanos Alexoupolos, The Pre-Sanctified Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite: a Comparative Analysis of its Origins, Evolution, and Structural Components (Peeters, 2009), xvi+355pp. 

In his expert review of Alexoupolos in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, the Byzantine liturgical scholar Peter Galadza lauded his book and said that his work is sure to become the scholarly standard for years to come.

Resources for Great Lent 2021

The Gregorian paschalion is out by a month this year from the Julian, the latter having Pascha on the first Sunday of May, the former on the first Sunday of April. So today begins for some Eastern Christians the Great Fast. 

I would direct you here to what I wrote in 2017 for my thoughts on the best books to understand Lent and both its liturgical history as well as its ascetical practices. 

The Possibility of an Ascetical Politics in Spite of Death (III)

Continuing on with McGowan's extremely interesting book Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis: he advances some insights into how the consuming impulses are exploited by capitalism through very subtle but powerful unconscious influences, including a play on nostalgia for a past we are only dimly aware of at best. Products are marketed to us but this, McGowan says, is based ultimately on a false promise: “Objects of desire are desirable only insofar as they attempt to represent the impossible lost object” (30).

Rather than try to work around this, McGowan says the genius of psychoanalysis is that it redirects our attention to the very thing we think we are missing (as Adam Phillips also does, as I noted in earlier parts of this essay), and says this thing is in fact what we should focus on: "psychoanalysis frees the subject to find satisfaction through the subject’s symptomatic disruption rather than continuing to view the disruption as the obstacle to the ultimate satisfaction that the subject is constantly missing” (57). Put more simply, in some cases rather than lamenting one's "symptoms" or what appears to be lacking in one's life, realize instead that the apparently lost object is a lie offering false hope that will never really satisfy even if one could attain it. Desire is always holding itself out as something we want, but always just outside our range, perpetually frustrating us. Desire doesn’t want satisfaction but continued desire. Capitalism depends on this. 

Our failure to come to this realization is due in part to the "cross-contamination," as it were, of desire on the part of what Freud controversially called the death drive: “The neurotic mistakes the experience of the death drive for the experience of desire" (59). The task of psychoanalysis is to help the analysand see this and move past it.

On a broader cultural level, though, the great insight offered by psychoanalysis is to frustrate capitalism by shifting focus away from the often mindless desire to accumulate the ever-new objects claiming to offer us, yet again, the hope of satisfaction that has hitherto eluded us. We do not find these objects; and in the few cases when we think we do, it turns out that satisfaction is not very satisfying and so we quickly get back into the consuming loop, thereby fueling capitalism, which needs limited dissatisfaction—just enough to propel people to think that the next object will in fact satisfy them. As McGowan says, “The fundamental project of capitalist ideology involves identifying accumulation with enjoyment.”

Unlike other theorists who have treated these issues, McGowan rightly criticizes the Marxism that is sometimes too facilely counter-posed to capitalism, arguing that Marxism itself has failed to challenge this identification of accumulation with enjoyment. In Marxism and communism, the focus shifts to the means of production, assuming that a free proletariat will produce endlessly because this is the way to endless enjoyment -as-accumulation.

What is the answer to this? Though McGowan does not use theological language about ascetic detachment, it seems very clearly to me that this is what he has in mind: “The point is not to take a vow of poverty and attempt to live without any commodities at all but to transform one’s relation to the commodity. The commodity does provide enjoyment, but only insofar as one doesn’t have it” (85). Once one has acquired the commodity, then, the enjoyment declines and ceases, in some cases almost at once; but the desire motivating its acquisition in the first place roars on, seeking new things to consume. What is the antidote to this? According to McGowan, “more enjoyment — that is, the recognition of our satisfaction — is only possible insofar as we abandon the imperative to accumulate.”

That seems a fine message to think on more deeply as we move into the detachment which is the Lenten desert in just a few short weeks.

Concluded. 

The Bright Sadness of the Great Fast

Today is Pure Monday on the Gregorian paschalion, and Wednesday is Ash Wednesday in the Western Churches. (Pascha, and hence Lent, is, alas, much later this year on the Julian paschalion.) Thus some Eastern Christians, and all Western Christians, are this week beginning their Lenten askesis. For suggested reading on and during this great time, I cannot improve on last year's collection of books, especially Alexander Schmemann's wonderful Great Lent: Journey to Pascha.

In the last decade, I wrote a number of articles published in a variety of journals all devoted to the topic of fasting in the Christian East, a topic which seems to be attracting greater attention among Roman Catholics (whose bishops in England and Wales have recently restored Friday fasting--or, more correctly, abstinence) and among Protestants, as seen in a brand new book: Kent D. Berghuis, Christian Fasting: A Theological Approach (Biblical Studies Press, 2013), 308pp.

About this book we are told:

This published dissertation develops an integrative theology of fasting from an evangelical Christian perspective. The progress of revelation is seen as centering on the work of Jesus Christ in a canonical theology. Two chapters have been devoted to studying the references to fasting in scripture, one each on the Old and New Testaments. This reflection is also done in conversation with the Christian community, both in its historical trajectories as well as contemporary forms. A chapter has been devoted to the extensive discussion of fasting in the patristic era, as well as another chapter that traces the history of fasting practices through monasticism, the Reformation, and into their decline in the modern era. In the fifth chapter of the body of the dissertation, the contemporary reawakening to fasting in Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical traditions is examined. The integrating eschatological motif of the nature of the age that is seen emerging from the larger study of fasting is then stated in a christocentric fashion within the context of the story of God’s redemption. This synthetic theology is applied in the cultural context of evangelical Christianity in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Christian fasting must ultimately be centered on Christ, reflect proper ways of engaging the human body in sanctification, and remember the corporate nature of the believer’s community. It is hoped that this thesis will set fasting in an appropriate, positive theological context, so that its biblical and Christian heritage might be expressed in renewed spiritual expressions.

Lenten Consumption

Unlike last year, alas, the Julian and Gregorian paschalions do not coincide this year but are a week apart. Today is Pure Monday for Byzantine Christians on the Gregorian calendar; next Monday is the same for those on the Julian. 

It is a singular cause for despair that, after forty-odd years of talking about the importance of finding a common date for Pascha--an issue so important it was addressed by the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in 325 no less--Christians still have not done so, an unhappy state that rather strongly suggests that more than a few of us are not, in fact, willing to do so. Talk is cheap: where is the action? In the absence of action, sometimes one cannot entirely escape the otherwise intolerable thought that perhaps unity really is an eschatological prospect. In that case, all of us had better be prepared for a very stiff trial indeed before the awesome tribunal of Christ. 

Anyway, for the start of Great Lent on either calendar, we have a new book from Oxford University Press reminding us that Christians not only fast and abstain from food, but are called to askesis and discernment in all of life: Laura M. Hartman, The Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World (OUP, 2011), 272pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Be it fair trade coffee or foreign oil, our choices as consumers affect the well-being of humans around the globe, not to mention the natural world and of course ourselves. Consumption is a serious ethical issue, and Christian writers throughout history have weighed in, discussing topics such as affluence and poverty, greed and gluttony, and proper stewardship of resources. These voices are often at odds, however. In this book, Laura M. Hartman formulates a coherent Christian ethic of consumption, imposing order on the debate by dividing it into four imperatives: Christians are to consume in ways that avoid sin, embrace creation, love one's neighbor, and envision the future. An adequate ethics of consumption, she argues, must include all four considerations as tools for discernment, even when they seem to contradict one another. The book includes discussions of Christian practices such as fasting, gratitude, solidarity, gift-giving, Sabbath-keeping, and the Eucharist. Using exemplars from the Christian tradition and practical examples from everyday life, The Christian Consumer offers a thoughtful guide to ethical consumption.