Our spiritual journey through the Great Fast is marked by the Sundays of Lent, each having its own precise significance. First, we celebrate the victory of the Orthodox Faith in the year 843 over heresies—a victory expressed in the re-establishing of the veneration of icons. Then we honor St. Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, who defended the Orthodox teaching regarding the difference between the incomprehensible nature of God and His uncreated energies, which are shed abroad over the world. We can think of this first part of Lent as having dogmatic connotations, as being a call to reflect on the Church’s teachings. On the 3rd Sunday of Lent, in the middle of the Great Fast, the Church has established the veneration of the Holy and Life-Giving Cross of our Savior, which strengthens us and calls us to the spiritual fervor we need to complete the Fast.

On the 4th Sunday of Holy Lent, we honor the author of a piece of literature which is very well known in Orthodox spirituality, The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John of Sinai, or of the Ladder. And if we remember that on the 5th Sunday of Lent we honor St. Mary of Egypt, then we understand the ascetical significance of the second part of Lent.

St. John lived between 579 and 649, following the monastic life first in obedience to a spiritual father, then for 40 years living in solitude, quietness, and prayer. Only after this long spiritual struggle did he accept to be abbot of St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, during which time he wrote The Ladder as a response to the request of Abbot John of the nearby Raith Monastery, that he would give the monks a written rule to live by, in order to ascend toward heaven as upon a ladder, like the one seen by the Patriarch Jacob in his dream.

This spiritual treatise, recommended as the first thing to read during Lent, could not have been written except by someone who had already experienced what he described. Thus St. John is considered to have accomplished, himself, this ascent, and to be, himself, a living model of spiritual science. In one of the canticles from the Canon on the day we celebrate St. John we read: “You went to dwell in the heights of Heaven, shining with the glory of the virtues. You entered the boundless depths of contemplation; you exposed to mockery all the snares of the demons, protecting mankind from their cruel violence, and now, John, ladder of the virtues, you intercede for the salvation of your servants”.

St. John of the Ladder is an icon of restraint and ascesis; therefore, his festal celebration gives us an opportunity to examine ourselves and remember the meaning of Fasting in our lives. The troparia of the 4th Sunday of Lent speak of his ascetical struggle, by which he destroyed the pleasures and passions and gained the purity of passionlessness. Through the power of the Holy Spirit he became the master of his own body, ascending on the wings of prayer to the spiritual light of contemplation, so that he could then illumine the world and feed his disciples with the fruits of self-control.

St. John of the Ladder shines as the very model of monasticism and of the spiritual science into which we are initiated during the Great Fast. May the evocation of his virtues be a cause for celebration and rejoicing for us who desire to become monastics during the time of Lent, united with God and pacified in our souls.

† Metropolitan Nicolae