Our journey to Holy Pascha, through the preparation and discipline of Great Lent, offers an opportunity for reflection, renewal, and most of all repentance.
That we have this opportunity each year reflects the fundamental human need to constantly, deliberately return to communion with God. So often we separate ourselves from His love through our own failings. Repentance provides a path toward renewed communion, a way—through God’s grace—to return to Him. Perhaps at no time in the Church year do we feel the need for repentance more strongly than during Great Lent.
For in this season, the Church guides us to more focused prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, offering the tools for repentance. These disciplines ground us with humbling reminders that all we are and all we have come from Him, the Father of Lights.
As we do this work, relying on God’s great mercy, it may comfort us to remember that we walk among the communion of saints. We are not alone. In these pages, IOCC humbly offers encouragement for the Lenten path we all walk, with prayers that your soul may be refreshed in some small way.
It is my joy to invite you to once again begin the journey to Pascha, our Church’s greatest feast and our Lord’s greatest victory, the triumph over death. May we each reflect this great hope by serving others as Christ asks—because He loves us and gave Himself for us!
His Eminence Metropolitan Nicolae
Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of the Americas
Liaison to IOCC from the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States
Icon courtesy of the estate of Mr. Diamantis John Cassis
