Our Venerable Father and Confessor Theophanes of Sigriana (817); Our Holy Father Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome (604)
Great Fast Day 26
Sixth Hour – Isaiah 29:13-23; Presanctified – Genesis 12:1-7; Proverbs 14:15-26
Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat. According to liturgical prescriptions, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated today.
Read Isaiah 29:13-23
Lord save my soul from lying lips, from the tongue of the deceitful. We pray from these psalm of ascents every evening at Vespers during the Great Fast. These words resonate with the prophecy of Isaiah read today in the Byzantine Tradition: “These people draw near me: they honour me with their lips, while their heart is far from me” (29:13).
As Byzantine Christians, our liturgy is filled with words. We might think that the goal of the liturgy is to parrot idly the words of the liturgy but never say them from our heart! The Byzantine liturgy aims to give us words that allow the Holy Spirit to speak within us, the groaning too deep for words that Paul discusses. In the liturgy, we are given words to unload our grief and our longings. It is a set of words given to us by God to allow our soul to be laid bare.
Think of a rock concert. The audience comes with the lyrics memorized ready to sing along with the musicians the very lyrics crafted. Each audience member brings their own heartbreak, each flood of emotion high and low to the words of the author.
The Byzantine Liturgy is scripture woven to be precisely this soundtrack that we are able to attach our grief to. The liturgy is the vessel, the alabaster jar, if you will, that allows us to place the perfumed oil of our emotions in. We break all of this before the Lord and allow it to ascend to him like incense.
Let us draw near to the Lord, not with lips, but “with faith and love. That we may become partakers of life everlasting” (Liturgy of the Presanctified).