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Hallo again to all.
Welcome, dear feast of Lent.
Last
updated: 26 February 2006 * Advent tells us Christ is near; / Christmas tells us Christ is here!
/ In Epiphany we trace / all the glory of his grace. |
 This web site is independent. It is not official in any way. Our editorial staff is private and unaffiliated. Please contact editor@anglicansonline.org about information on this page. ©2006 Society of Archbishop Justus |
In
the 
We
do not know anyone who ever looked forward with strained anticipation
for one or another of the Gesimas as his or her favourite Sunday in
the year, but it strikes us in retrospect that they may have contained
a valuable point about churchly life: we can always prepare ourselves
for what lies ahead by patience and confidence, and sometimes this
can even take the form of preparation for preparation. Lent, after
all, is a season in which to prepare ourselves for Easter. But can
we really go directly from noise and feasting to quietness and religious
discipline at the flip of a switch? We do not know many whose lives
of prayer and activity are so malleable. It is a liminal on-the-borders
season like Pre-Lent with its Gesimas that allows us to think for a
time longer than the Ash Wednesday service what our Lenten life will
be, and where we hope it will take us.
As
any good teacher, cook or athlete understands, there is little sense
in preparing for something of a sudden, unless one has already prepared
to prepare. One must read before making lesson plans; make a recipe
and go to market before getting out the pots and pans; and woe to the
runner who fails to stretch before warming up. In a Christian context,
one can decide beforehand what one's Lenten efforts will
be, but if the Amazon book orders are not made in time, books may not
arrive before Lent has gone ahead at real speed. Likewise, places for
extra quiet and prayer and service cannot usually be carved out of
schedules on the spot. The carving has to happen before the real work
of preparation can take place. The presence of the Gesimas' preparation-for-preparation
in the church calendar since at least the eighth century would make
the case against this being a particularly modern problem. We tend
to think of ourselves as generally busier than the ancients, and so
excused from the strength of their devotion, but three Gesimas call
us to take stock of that excuse and to evaluate it in terms of the
very Easter from which they are named. While we lump them together
as 'Pre-Lent,' their own names are taken not from their relation to
Lent, but from their hopeful focus on how far they are from Easter.
This is a reassuring and lovely thing written into the old calendar,
and its loss is not a small thing. 
Surely
this
Gesima logic—the idea that preparation requires preparation—can be
taken too far: after all, there is always a new holyday for which to
prepare during the Christian year. (We can see something of this tendency
in Eastern Orthodoxy, where 'little
lents' have
grown up before the Dormition and the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul.
This may work in an Orthodox liturgical context, but it is not how
Anglicans and other western Christians have tended to measure out the
ecclesiastical year.) A preparatory season for the Ascension or Pentecost
or All Saints Day would turn the calendar into a jumbly mess in short
order. No matter the name of the Sunday on pew-sheets, lectionaries
and calendars, though, the practical ancient wisdom of the Gesimas
is a helpful, gracious guide to walking through the young year carefully. 