Yesterday we started Great Lent. First we started reading the Bible from the very beginning together. Hannah read from the book of Genesis. We lit incense as we said our prayers, which now include prostrations (bending our knees and putting our head to the floor) and the prayer of St. Ephraim:
O Lord and Master of my life, a spirit of idleness,
despondency, ambition, and idle talking give me not. But rather a
spirit of chastity, humble-mindedness, patience, and love
bestow upon me Thy servant. Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to
see my failings and not condemn my brother; for blessed art Thou
unto the ages of ages. Amen.
The following excerpt is taken from Ivan Shmelyov's
Anno Domini, a wistful
recollection of life in his pious, old-fashioned, well to-do home in
pre-Revolutionary Moscow.
Clean Monday
I waken from harsh light in my room: a bare kind of light, cold, dismal.
Yes, it's Great Lent today. The pink curtains, with their hunters and their
ducks, have already been taken down while I slept, and that's why it's so bare
and dismal in the room. It's Clean Monday today for us, and everything in our
house is being scrubbed. Greyish weather, the thaw. The dripping beyond the
window is like weeping. Our old carpenter-Gorkin, "the panel
man"--said yesterday that when Lady Shrovetide leaves, she'll weep. And so
she is--drip...drip...drip... There she goes! I look at the paper flowers
reduced to shreds, at the gold-glazed "Shrovetide" sweetcake--a toy,
brought back from the baths yesterday; gone are the little bears, gone are the
little hills--vanished, the joy. And a joyous something begins to fuss in my
heart; now everything is new, different. Now it'll be "the soul
beginning"--Gorkin told me all about it yesterday. "It's time to ready
the soul," To prepare for Communion, to keep the fast, to make ready for
the Bright Day.
"Send
One-eye in to see me!" I hear Father's angry shouting.
Father
has not gone out on business; it's a special day today, very strict. Father
rarely shouts. Something important has happened. But after all he forgave the
man for drinking; he cancelled all his sins; yesterday was the day of
Forgiveness. And Vasii Vasillich forgave us all, too, that's exactly what Ire
said in the dining room, kneeling: "I forgive you all!" So why is
Father shouting then?
The
door opens, Gorkin comes in with a gleaming copper basin. Oh, yes, to smoke out
Lady Shrovetide! There's a hot brick in the basin, and mint, and they pour
vinegar over them. My old nurse, Domnushka, follows Gorkin around and does the
pouring; it hisses in the basin and a tart steam rises a sacred steam. I can
smell it even now, across the distance of the years. Sacred... that's what
Gorkin calls it. He goes to all the corners and gently swirls the basin. And
then he swirls it over me.
"Get
up, dearie, don't pamper yourself," he speaks lovingly to me, sliding the
basin under the skirt of the bed. "Where's she hid herself in your room,
fat old Lady Shrovetide... We'll drive her out. Lent has arrived .... We'll be
going to the Lenten market, the choir from St. Basil's will be singing 'My soul,
my soul arise;' you won't be able to tear yourself away,"
That
unforgettable, that sacred smell. The smell of Great Lent. And Gorkin himself,
completely special--as if he were kind of sacred, too. Way before light, he had
already gone to the bath, steamed himself thoroughly, put on everything clean.
Clean Monday today! Only the kazakin is old; today only the most workaday
clothes may be worn, that's "the law". And it's a sin to laugh, and
you have to rub a bit of oil on your head. like Gorkin. I'll be eating without
oil now, but you have to oil the head, it's the law, "for the prayer's
sake." There's a flow about him, from his little gray beard, all silver
really, from the neatly combed head. I know for a fact that he's a saint.
They're like that, God's people, that please Him. And his face is pink, like a
cherubim's, from the cleanness. I know that he's dried himself bits of black
bread with salt, and all Lent long he'll take them with his tea, "instead
of sugar."
But
why is Daddy angry...with Vasil Vasillich, like that?
"Oh,
sinfulness..." says Gorkin with a sigh. “It's hard to break habits, and
now everything is strict, Lent. And, well, they get angry. But you hold fast
now, think about your soul. It's the season, all the same as if the latter days
were come...that's the law! You just recite, "O Lord and Master of my
life...' and be cheerful."
And
I begin silently reciting the recently memorized Lenten prayer.
The
rooms are quiet and deserted, full of that sacred smell. In the front room,
before the reddish icon of the Crucifixion, a very old one , from our sainted
great-grandmother who was an Old Believer; a "lenten" lampada of clear
glass has been lit, and now it will burn unextinguished until Pascha. When
Father lights it--on Saturdays he lights all the lampadas himself--he always
sings softly, in a pleasant-sad way: "Before Thy Cross, we bow down, O
Master," and I would sing softly after him, that wonderful refrain:
"And Thy holy... Resurrection, we glorify!”
A
joy-to-tears beats inside my soul, shining from these words. And I behold it,
behind the long file of lenten days--the Holy Resurrection, in lights. A joyful
little prayer! It casts a kindly beam of light upon these sad days of Lent.
I
begin to imagine that now the old life is coming to an end, and it' s time to
prepare for that other, life, which will be...where? Somewhere, in the
heavens. You have to cleanse the soul of all sinfulness, and that's why
everything around you is different. And something special is at our side,
invisible and fearful. Gorkin told me that now, "it's like when the soul is
parting from the body." THEY keep watch, to snatch away the soul, and all
the while the soul trembles and wails: "Woe is me, I am cursed!" They
read about it in church now, at the Standings.
--"Because
they can sense that their end is coming near, that Christ will rise! And that's
why we're a-given Lent for, to keep close to church, to live to see the Bright
Day. And not to reflect, you understand. About earthly things, do not reflect!
And they'll be ringing everywhere: 'Think back! ..Think-back!..." He made
the words boom inside him nicely.
Throughout
the house the window vents are open, and you can hear the mournful cry and
summons of the bells, ringing before the services: think-back...think-back.
That's the piteous bell, crying for the soul. It's called the lenten peal.
They've taken the shutters down from the windows, and it'll be that way,
poor-looking, clear until Pascha. In the drawing-room, there are gray slipcovers
on the furniture; the lamps are bundled up into cocoons, and even the one
painting, "The Beauty at the Feast," is draped over with a sheet. That
was the suggestion of His Eminence. Shook his head sadly and said: "A
sinful and tempting picture!" But Father likes it a lot--such class! Also
draped is the engraving which Father for some reason calls "the sweetcake
one"; it shows a little old man dancing, and an old woman hitting him with
a broom. That one His Eminence liked a great deal, even laughed. All the house
folk are very serious, in workday clothes with patches, and I was told also to
put on the jacket with the worn-through elbows. The rugs have been taken out;
it's such a lark now to skate across the parquet. Only it's scary to try--Great
Lent: skate hard and you'll break a leg. Not a crumb left over from Shrovetide,
mustn't be so much as a trace of it in the air. Even the sturgeon in aspic was
passed down to the kitchen yesterday. Only the very plainest dishes are left in
the sideboard, the ones with the dun spots and the cracks...for Great Lent. In
the front room there are bowls of yellow pickles, little umbrellas of dill
sticking out of them, and chopped cabbage, tart and thickly dusted with anise--a
delight. I grab pinches of it--how it crunches! And I vow to myself to eat only
lenten foods for the duration of the fast. Why send my soul to perdition, since
everything tastes so good anyway! There'll be stewed fruit, potato pancakes with
prunes, "crosses" on the Week of the Cross...frozen cranberries with
sugar, candied nuts... And what about roast buckwheat kasha with onions, washed
down with kvass! And then lenten pasties with milk-mushrooms, and then buckwheat
pancakes with onions on Saturdays... and the boiled wheat with marmalade on the
first Saturday...and almond milk with white kissel, and the cranberry one with
vanilla, and the grand kuliebiak on Annunciation .... Can it be that THERE,
where everyone goes to and from this life, there will be such lenten fare! And why
is everyone so dull-looking? Why, everything is so...so different, and there is
much, so much that is joyous. Today they'll bring the first ice and begin to
line the cellars--the whole yard will be stacked with it. We'll go to the
"Lenten Market," and the Great Mushroom Market, where I've never
been... I begin jumping up and down with joy, but they stop me: "It's Lent,
don't dare! Just wait and see, you'll break your leg!"
Fear
comes over me. I look at the Crucifixion. He suffers, the Son of God! But how is
it that God... how did He allow it?...
I
have a sense that herein lies the great mystery itself--GOD.
(Translated from the Russian by Maria Belaeff)
from: http://www.roca.org/OA/47/47g.htm
♥ And we clean our house, taking the bedsheets off all the beds, putting them in the washing machine, dusting, vacuuming and sweeping the house, shaking out the dog's bedding...
Today, we are washing the windows.
