Clean Friday. Our Venerable Father and Confessor Basil, Ascetical Companion of Procopius (716-40)
Great Fast Day 5. Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Read
Proverbs 3:19-34
Surely he scorns the scornful: but he gives grace unto the lowly.
We read proverbs in this way during lent as an antidote to the human failings we hear so clearly in Genesis: betrayal of God’s commandments, the blame game of Adam and eve, the violence of Lamech, and so on.
Here, Proverbs sings as clearly as the Mother of God’s Magnificat. Lowliness is gifted with grace. Why is that? humility cracks us open, ready to receive God. How are we to begin this road to humility. We begin again with the Mother of God’s life. her simple “yes” to God’s will for her life and continues that throughout her earthly existence and onward into her heavenly rest.
The Mother of God, like the book of proverbs, undoes the fault of our first parents. It takes a new Eve to show us how to shake us loose from the grip of the fall of Adam.