Shubkono

Our prayer must be:
Come, my wretched soul, and weep today over your acts, remembering how once you were stripped naked in Eden and cast out from delight and unending joy.
Lent is beginning, and as the personal tone of the hymns professes, this is to be my Fast, my exile, my return. I cannot of myself escape from Adam’s condition. But through the Church, I need not suffer alone the whole torment of Adam. ‘Let us love abstinence, that we may not weep as he did outside Paradise, but may enter through the gate.’ Great Lent is also a harbor, a safe port wherein we may suffer our repentance in the surety of divine grace and tender compassion. Thus do we petition the Lord:

O God of all, Lord of mercy, look down compassionately upon my lowliness and do not send me far away from Eden; but may I perceive the glory from which I have fallen, and hasten with lamentations to regain what I have lost

We are called to amend and to change our ways of living, thinking and acting from within the full scope of our lives in Christ. During Lent we are thrust into a forum for change, wherein our greatest aid is the incarnate and resurrected Son of God Himself.

The arena of the virtues has been opened. Let all who wish to struggle for the prize now enter, girding themselves for the noble contest of the Fast; for those that strive lawfully are justly crowned. Taking up the armor of the Cross, let us make war against the enemy. Let us have as our invisible rampart the Faith, prayer as our breastplate, and as our helmet almsgiving; and as our sword let us use fasting that cuts away all evil from our heart. If we do this, we shall receive the true crown from Christ the King of all at the Day of Judgment.

‘Let us use fasting that cuts away all evil from our heart.’ The entrance into Great Lent is made as the entrance into the full fray of the spiritual and physical battle we must each wage on the journey into the Kingdom of God. And though this is a battle we must each wage ourselves, we do not enter into it alone. As an invisible rampart, we have the truth of God revealed in His Son and in all the economy of space and time, borne alive in our hearts through the illumination of baptism. And as a visible rampart we have the Church, though here, too, there is the reality of the invisible. It is within the community of all the faithful, past and present, that we struggle towards resurrection, towards Kymtho. It is amidst our neighbors that we stand in this arena and wage this battle. ‘If we do this, we shall receive the true crown.’ From the usual context of ‘I’ and ‘You’ in which we communicate day by day, Great Lent calls us to stand before the gates of Paradise in solidarity as the great family of humankind, the united children on the one God.

And so, forgiveness. The first step in our journey through Lent must be this act of mutual forgiveness, of reconciling ourselves to one another in the context of the holy community in which we shall grow and advance together. If we set out upon the season of inner repentance without beginning here, in an act of fraternal repentance, then we will certainly find ourselves ‘committing sin while singing hymns with our tongues.’ The gate of Paradise will only be more firmly shut. But if this moment of mutual forgiveness is embraced and made real in our lives, then we shall be readily equipped both as individuals and as a community to fight worthily the battle before us. It shall not be we alone in the arena, but we the united Church who stand together in the contest that leads to all the brightness of the third-day Resurrection. And from within this community we will be able to find in our own selves the authentic voice of our genuine individuality, and shall be able to cry out and say:

Cleanse me in the waters of repentance, and through prayer and fasting make me shine with light, for Thou alone art merciful. Abhor me not, O Benefactor of all, supreme in love.

Ashwalan moryo aloho b’tayboothok l’hoosoyo d’hawbai w’shoobqono dahtohai b’hono yawmo qadisho d’ithaw shooroyo d’soomoyeekh qadisho.

Make us worthy, O Lord God, by Your abundant grace, for the remission of sins and the forgiveness of debts on this holy day, which is the beginning of Your Holy Fast.

Written by Tenny Thomas
source: http://www.neamericandiocese.org/feasts-memorials.10/shubkono.aspx