The Great Lent. How to begin it properly?

The Metropolitan Anthony (Packanich) gives advice about where to begin the Great Lent.

The Great Lent should be started by forgiving insults. A forgiving is a release. A person who didn’t feel this release haven’t lived yet.

The starting Great Lent is the time of life, the time of freedom. And we must try to forgive our insulters not only on the Great Lent’s eve — the whole lent becomes a door into the new life with no insults.

Any resentment is a sign of a deep-rooted pride. It doesn’t let us look at ourselves smoothly, without breathing, with a humorous undertone. Any glance shot at a prideful person is critically estimated and taken with a special acuity. Any other’s opinion, latitude are disputed, and a criticism makes hopping mad.

Living is hard for proud people. And they actually don’t live, but they bear the cargo of resentment, appraisals, regular annoyance. Pinned down by this cargo, they’re not able to see beyond their nose, and they have no possibility to look around, to look at the Sky.

Angriness and annoyance are signs of a prideful temperament. This type of people have a sense of grandeur about theirselves, they set theirselves up to be better, higher, more estimable than others. Definitely, there’re occasions where we’re made to be beside ourselves with rage, but it doesn’t condones these gushes of anger.

Resentment is a sickness of soul, it’s an open wound which hurts all the time and doesn't let breathe and feel in full force.

It strongly chains human’s feelings and willpower with ferrule not letting him be revealed, renewed.

We all are creatures of God. And every resentment against His creature drops a shadow on Creator. Certainly, this shadow blacks out the Saviour in no wise, it fences us off to Him.

The resentment hides us from Him. The resentment spoils life, kills the gladness and desolates human. Getting rid of it is the beginning of salvation.

Let the Great Lent become the time of good work on our sins, let the resentment be rooted out from our hearts forever as a destroying and deadly power. Let the gladness about God repress all miseries in our hearts, and let it help us to put on Christ in a renewed life.

Recorded by Natalia Goroshkova

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