Owing to my interest in sacred music and liturgy in general, I’ve been asked to join a few groups on Facebook. Recently, in one of these, I was quite amused by a long debate that had broken out. On one side was a Catholic liturgist, a very learned man whose writings I greatly esteem. In the opposing corner was an Orthodox believer, about whom I know little. The dispute was about the relative amount of rejoicing and lamenting to be found in the Lenten liturgies of the East and West. The Orthodox writer insisted that Western liturgies focused more on sin and penance, whereas the Byzantine liturgies were brighter, focusing on the joy of God’s salvation, and so on.
There are indeed many joyful texts in the Byzantine liturgies for Lent. But there are also long passages in which the faithful accuse themselves of every imaginable sin, of being the worst of all sinners, hard of heart. There are claims for continually weeping over sin. In this, I tended to side with my acquaintance, the Latin liturgist, who made just this argument.
What amused me, though, was the very idea that penance and the joy of Lent could be separated at all. This apparent paradox is easily understood if we attend to the theology of the liturgy. “While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son. [Romans 5: 10]” We do not weep for our sins hoping that God will save us if we attain the minimum required amount of contrition. Rather, we are already saved, despite the fact that we couldn’t possibly merit salvation. And it is this realization of God’s patience, His loving pursuit of us in our unloveliness, that gives rise to true penthos, or compunction. It is the response of the faithful on Pentecost. When they realized that they had conspired to put to death God’s Son, “they were cut to the heart [Acts 2: 37].” But did they therefore despair? No! They repented and were baptized, becoming followers of the Apostles.
It is well attested of many saints that, as they grew in holiness and nearness to God, they felt less worthy of friendship with God. The brighter the light in which we find ourselves, the more we see our imperfections. Yet it is God’s very nearness and purity, an experience, at root, of awe and bliss, that gives rise to this insight about ourselves. The closer we come to God in the liturgy and in prayer and in asceticism, the more we see how our sins keep us from fully experiencing the joy of life in Christ. And so we weep for our sins precisely because we are drawing near to God’s selfless, regenerating love. It is what theologian Khaled Anatolios calls “doxological contrition,” and which he holds to be the central meaning of salvation.
As I never tire of mentioning, Saint Benedict, who was extremely realistic about human failings and vices, mentions joy twice in his short chapter on the observance of Lent.
What is being described is the theological virtue of hope. Hope is the great forgotten theological virtue, and so perhaps it is no surprise that this Facebook disagreement went unresolved. For hope to be hope, we must hold in tension the fact that we remain sinners in need of salvation, and that somehow salvation has already been accomplished. In fact, until the eschaton, we are necessarily saved, not with final assurance, but “in hope [Romans 8:24]”: in such a way that we must continually work out our salvation in “fear and trembling [Philippians 2: 12].”