PREPARING OUR ATTITUDE FOR GREAT LENT
Contrary to what many think or feel, Lent is a time of joy.
It is a time when we come back to life.
It is a time when we shake off what is bad and dead in us in order to become able to live, to live with all the vastness, all the depth, and all the intensity to which we are called. Unless we understand this quality of joy in Lent, we will make of it a monstrous caricature, a time when in God’s own name we make our life a misery.
This notion of joy connected with effort, with ascetical endeavor, with strenuous effort may indeed seem strange, and yet it runs through the whole of our spiritual life, through the life of the Church and the life of the Gospel.
The Kingdom of God is something to be conquered.
It is not simply given to those who leisurely, lazily wait for it to come.
To those who wait for it in that spirit, it will come indeed: it will come at midnight; it will come like the Judgment of God, like the thief who enters when he is not expected, like the bridegroom, who arrives while the foolish virgins are asleep.
This is not the way in which we should await Judgment and the Kingdom.
Metropolitan Anthony Bloom