Augustine Sokolovski
The Leavetaking of Pentecost, which the Orthodox Church celebrates on the Saturday before All Saints', marks the end of a special long period. This period lasts exactly one hundred days, and it represents two symbolic Pentecosts and consists of the time of Lent and Easter taken together. They are experienced by the Church in a special liturgical and prayerful inspiration, which has no equal during the year. This is almost a third of the year, that is, every third day given by God and lived by people. Such an understanding of time is important, obvious and necessary for believers.
So, these are two periods: Lent and Easter Time, or the period of Pentecost. They are both different and both alive. Lent is a sad time, in many ways melancholic, with personal, social and “ecclesiological” sorrow. This is the Lord's sorrow for people and the sorrow of people in Jesus Christ. Easter time, according to its design and liturgical charter, is filled with many joyful services, occasions for litanies and religious processions, and, most importantly, with constant repetitions of the Easter greeting "Christ is Risen". This greeting must never be forgotten, and one must constantly encourage oneself to it.
For the property of the Christian faith is such that it is precisely at the moment of transmitting it to others that it comes to life in the heart and mind of the one transmitting it and grants oneself to be aware of oneself as a believer. Thanks to all this, Easter time is experienced as joyful, impetuous, inspiring.
Lent and Easter are two living, completely different times that are mutually connected by the Easter night. For believers in Christ, this period is a school of attitude towards time. Time is alive, and the Christian perception of time presupposes an attitude towards it as something alive really. However, not every time is like that. And it is also important not to forget about this.
After all, there is chronological time. This is the deadening time that eventually brings everyone to the grave, and before that makes most people suffer and torment. Moreover, the suffering caused by this chronological time is not suffering in Christ and from God, but that tragic absurdity inherent in being that simply plunges everyone into aging and fading, which became the lot of humanity after the fall. Albert Camus, not being a religious thinker, but due to his incredible theological talent, really wrote about this absurdity of not redemption. Tradition credits the Church Father Saint Augustine (354–430) as the “inventor” of the modern understanding of time. Surprisingly, it was Augustine that Camus wrote his thesis on. Both were from Algeria, inspired in life and thought by the Mediterranean. A Church Father and a Nobel Laureate, a theologian and philosopher, a theologian from the early days of our civilization and a thinker from its decadent times, they look at the planet of people from eternity.
Parallel to the time of chronology, there is messianic time. It breaks through from here into eternity. Messianic time casts light on the threshold of complete otherness. Spaces, breath, light, everything that never ceases because it is gracious, from God, and therefore cannot end, are inherent in messianic time. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes, two times, chronological and messianic, live here on earth, just as both a child and an adult already live in a newborn person.
It is important to be able to learn from non-believers, and to benefit from what is preserved from the common heritage of all people, or from the biblical heritage, by those who believe differently. Ramadan is a fast in Islam. It is the same and obligatory for everyone. There is also a tradition of saying goodbye to Ramadan, when believers, perhaps somewhat in the folkloric spirit of popular piety, address Ramadan before its end with words of thanksgiving. This is thanksgiving to the fasting time that was granted, and sadness because it is ending and leaving. Perhaps, for a modern person who no longer has a religious upbringing, such a farewell to something that seems imposed sounds strange. They say, how can you regret that something imposed from the outside, or from above, by God, or religious authorities, is leaving. “Imagine that there’ no religion,” as John Lennon sang in the spirit of his era. But this is not so at all. It is important and necessary to be able to say goodbye to sacred time, and in general, one must be able to talk to it, and this is completely correct from a biblical point of view. Unfortunately, in our own spiritual and religious tradition we have largely lost this. We have ceased to be able to talk to time, we are not able to be in dialogue with it. Is this not the source of the general tendency of our time, modernity, both in the West and in the East, when people are universally dissatisfied with their age?
The week after the day of Pentecost itself is given to begin to learn to speak with time. This is the moment to turn to the Easter period that has passed and to thank the liturgical time of Easter for having been lived through in God. After all, this year we will no longer meet Easter, and next year only those whom the Lord deigns to do so will be able to see a new Easter time. “I wanted to spend this Easter with you, my brothers, but the Lord told me that you will already spend it with Me,” wrote our contemporary, the Apostle of Lepers, Saint Damian de Foster (1840–1899) in his last lines. Almost the same age as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), by the gift of grace he looked differently at his age and at his time, and was able, at least in part, but already here and now, on earth, to see this not in the spirit of the tragedy of eternal return, but through the eyes of God. The eyes of God protect from counterfeiting, they grant authenticity.
"When you leave, leave," says a secular proverb. Turning to Easter time, we ask differently. "When you leave, stay with us all year, all days and nights, O Easter." After all, Christ ascended to Heaven precisely to become the property of all mankind through the Church, in the Holy Spirit. After Pentecost, the Lord abides not only with the chosen circle of disciples, as was the case directly during the great forty days of Easter, but with the entire Universe, so that each of the believers, regardless of position and age, country and continent, and era, personally experiences this in a unique and special way.
Finally, there is a fundamental difference between those who bid farewell to the obligatory fast or any other, sacred or simply important, period of time. After all, the messianic time is the Time of the Church. It is a living time. It is alive not in itself, but by virtue of its correlation with God. As Albert Camus's "interlocutor" Saint Augustine once wrote about this: "Being outside of all time, God, in Christ Jesus, became temporary. In order to free us from time, He Himself became time." From now on, time is a synonym for the appearance of God in the flesh and one of the names of Jesus.