The Easter fast, the longest and harshest of the year, is the period in which Orthodox Christians go to church, confess and share communion, to properly welcome the celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection. I asked the priest if you can still do this for the “last hundred meters”.
Can you confess even if you have not prepared for this moment and there is not much time left until the great celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection? This is the question that many Christians ask themselves, and the fact that they have not fasted makes them think that they can no longer prepare properly for the great feast of Sunday.
In Orthodox teaching, confession is an act of soul purification and closeness to God. Through confession, the believer frees himself from sins, straightens his life and mentally prepares himself to meet the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection. Thus, confession becomes an essential stage in the authentic experience of Lent and in being close to God. Honest confession usually comes at the end of a period of fasting, prayer, reconciliation and a desire for change. In the fast pace in which we live, many Christians are no longer able to go through this stage that is so necessary for the soul and, moreover, they believe that they cannot do it because they “did not prepare” during the period of fasting.
I asked Father Gabriel Cazacu, priest at Cașin Monastery in Bucharest, what remains to be done, on the “last hundred meters”, if we have not fasted and we do not have a priest whose advice we have listened to.
The father points out that fasting means not only what we eat: “It means what we do, what we think in fasting, how we forgive each other, how we do not bite our neighbor during this time”. Fasting is addressed to the soul, because it balances the needs of the soul with those of the body, explains the priest. And during this period of fasting, we must confess, share, ideally with the family priest, because “each of us, each family, each believer, must have a priest”.
And if we don’t have a priest, we haven’t fasted, instead we feel the need for a change, what’s left to do? Who are we addressing?
“It is never too late to recognize that our soul needs nourishment, it needs guidance. We go to the church near our home, we go to the church where we were baptized, we go home to our hometown, and there, mother, father, grandfather, grandmother will definitely refer us to a priest. It’s never too late,” the priest reassures us.
“Fasting periods have this special quality of making us better”
“The thief on the cross, through his confession, even later, was saved. He was the first man to enter Heaven. A thief who was crucified with Jesus.” continued the priest.
Surely our spiritual father will find an advice, an important lesson, which will help us to be better people, explains priest Gabriel Cazacu: “He will direct us to do a good deed, to clothe a child, to care for an old man, to go visit a helpless man, a man forgotten by his fellow man, but not forgotten by God. There are many ways in which we can prove that we resemble God in the good deed and that we help God with our love.”
Taking care of what we eat, which for many becomes the main thing in fasting, should be only one of the necessary aspects of preparation for the great feast. “Let’s wake up and realize that we are not just a body”, the priest exhorts us, explaining that, like the body that needs to be washed, arranged, dressed, etc., everything that has become a routine, the soul also needs periodic “let him also clean his shirt in which he is clothed”. “And this shirt, burdened by many kinds of sins that we commit – with deed, word or thought – gets dirty. And the periods of fasting have this special quality of making us better, of purifying our soul, of bringing us closer to God and to our fellow men.” concluded the parent.
