PIKHRISTOS AFTONF!

“Abba Isidore the priest said, ‘If you keep the fast strictly, if you give great alms to the poor, and regularly attend all the hours of prayer at church, and think it is you keeping the fast and you helping the poor and you praying as you ought, it is better never to fast or give alms or pray.’ ”—from The Sayings of the Fathers

The Great Fast ends in a few hours. Has it been worth it?

Are you different than you were forty days ago?

For the past forty days we’ve pondered how God deals with us as we try to follow Him. We’ve seen how He dealt with the Abbas and Ammas (the fathers and mothers) who followed Him into the desert, determined to find Him in the sand that stings the face and the heat that blisters the feet. Sometimes, as the hot wind swirled around them they heard His stern voice; sometimes, in the cool waters of an oasis they knew the gentleness of His Spirit. Through both the desert’s ferocity and subtle beauty they learned His ways.

Abba Isidore’s words seem to me good ones with which to end our Lent. “If you keep the fast, if you give alms, if you pray regularly, and think you’re doing these things, they’re better left undone.”

But it has been me. I am the one who’s done these things.

If, at the end of Lent, I can tell myself, “I’ve done it!”—it would’ve been better for my soul, Abba Isidore says, if I’d failed. A satisfactory Lent, one flawlessly “kept,” is a misspent Lent.

The “journey” through Lent, like the life-long search of our Christian fathers and mothers in the desert, is a quest for God, not self-mastery. At the end of Lent, as at the end of our lives, we hopefully see all is Grace. Everything and everywhere, in the cry of a newborn, the tears of a bride, the sobbing of the widower, God is present. He shows Himself in unbounded joy of a new graduate and the fierce mercy of a cancer diagnosis. All is Grace.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the Grace: so hard that many of us don’t believe it exists. We need something more.

And so there’s Easter: Light from darkness, Life from death, Joy from tears. Then we see plainly that which has been hidden from our minds but whispered to our hearts—all is Grace. “And you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”



Christ is risen. Christos Aneste. Christus resurrexit. Pikhristos Aftonf. Al-Masīḥ qām. Christus ist auferstanden. Kristo Amefufukka.

Happy Easter!