Monthly Message from Fr. Ghassan - March/April 2026

Monthly Message from Fr. Ghassan - March/April 2026

Lent, a Journey of the Kingdom

In the last week of the preparation period, after Meatfare Sunday, liturgical prayers rise to tell us about fasting: "Receiving the Feast of Fasting is full of joy and the beginning of Lent on this day is bright. Let us go forth, brothers, with great confidence and activity..."(Matins of Monday).

The prayers are related to feeding the hungry, staying away from animosity, from adultery, and telling lies.

It also shows that fasting has the power to overcome Satan's traps if they are well mastered. On the other hand, prayers place before the faithful the model of the holy Fathers as examples to follow in their journey towards Resurrection.

• Fasting, then, is a condition in which the believer enters to take off the clothes of passions and desires and to walk in the path of prayers, love, repentance, and forgiveness. There is nothing fragmented, but a complete and integrated unit.
• Father Lev Gillet says: Fasting is a time of spiritual education and enlightenment. It is a return to God and divine bliss. Did Adam not lose the Paradise of God's bliss because of the darkness resulting from pride and disobedience? Should he not first return to God with humility and commitment to the will of God? The exit from Paradise was not eternal because the door to return is always open.
  Hence, it is a clear delusion to base our fasting solely on a vegetarian and non-dairy diet, while ego and being blind towards others defect our souls and our behavior.
  “In Christianity, we speak not only of spiritual life but of life as a whole, where the body and the spirit coalesce.”

Our fasting journey is a pilgrimage of the Kingdom, opposite to the exit of the first human being. And when the Church mentions “eating” in the doxastikon hymn on Saturday eve: “Adam through eating was cast out of Paradise ...” she clarifies directly the true meaning of this sentence and says through Adam: “Woe to me, what happened to me, the wretched. I disobeyed one command of my Lord and thus I forfeited every kind of blessing.

Here is the bottom line, commitment to God’s project is a complete commitment to all of his commandments and not choosing what suits us best and violating them whenever we wanted I lost all good things.

We are called to establish a complete communion with God, a real communion, and every violation is adultery, that is, breaking the communion.
The project of fasting, accompanied by prayer, to focus on God the Creator, avoiding gluttony, empty and selfish pleasures, and all that harms us physically and spiritually, frees us from the bondage of self-love which is the greatest sin. This is what the Gospel of Forgiveness Sunday displays as the necessary points: forgiveness and humility.
Thus, on the Vespers of Forgiveness Sunday (Sunday eve), the Church declares the beginning of the journey.
After chanting the psalm: “Lord I have cried out on to Thee”, we read in the Triodion stichera: “Let us all make haste to humble the flesh by abstinence, as we set out upon the divine and unblemished Fast; and with prayers and tears let us seek out our Lord” … “I beseech Thee: cleanse me in the waters of repentance, and through prayer and fasting make me radiant”. “Let us joyously begin the season of the Fast and prepare ourselves for spiritual struggles. Let us purify our soul and cleanse our flesh, as we fast from food”.
All these prayers focus on the true meaning of fasting. Most beautiful in the service of vespers is the prokiemenon that is chanted after the hymn “O radiant light”, sung with a very expressive voice: “Turn not Thy face away from Thy servant, for I am in trouble; hear me speedily hearken unto my soul, and deliver it”.
Then the stikhon goes on: Let Thy salvation, O God, succor me… Let the poor see it and be glad. Choir: Turn not Thy face away.
It is a heartfelt cry: I am in trouble

• And if we ask the question: "What is this trouble?" We realize that it is man’s distance from God, peace and light. The opposite of light is darkness. That is, a person stands before the divine glory and its greatness and can only enter it if he wears the weapons of light, as the message of this Sunday said (Romans 11: 1-4: 14). The weapons of light are the virtues and the blessings of the Lord, and one can only attain them by repentance, confession, and returning to God.
  This hymn is repeated five times. These signs express that the misery of sin still in us.
  For the first time, the prayers of Saint Ephrem the Syrian are read in conjunction and prostrations.
  At the end of the sunset, the collective forgiveness and the person who leads the service is first.
  Summary: The goal of fasting, which is the first commandment of the Lord since man’s creation, is complete communion with God, body and soul, in word and deed.
• One who can control oneself before the appetite of the sight and the joy of the eye can definitely restrain oneself to lead a correct life with the Lord.
  We may find it hard to fast at first, but the end is light and secure resurrection. At this point, all measures will be reversed so that the end is the beginning of unending life in the kingdom.

 

The Sunday of orthodoxy

On the first Sunday of Great Lent, our Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Roman Church honors the icons. The Church dedicates this day to celebrating its victory over the heresy of iconoclasm, which lasted for approximately two hundred years, during which many icons were destroyed, dragged through the streets, trampled upon, and desecrated. The Church, alive with the Holy Spirit, rose from its wounds and declared at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in the eighth century that the holy icon is our window to the heavenly kingdom, and that the veneration is due to those depicted in the icon, not to the material from which it is made.

Much has been written about the icon, its theology, and its meanings.

The veneration of the living icon, whose substance is flesh and blood, is the veneration of Christ on earth. By this, I mean those who have become shining stars reflecting His glory and illuminating the path for all who approach Him and strive towards Him. Those who have died to themselves and been transformed into Christs, who have been baptized into Christ, dying to their sins and putting on Christ, who have diminished and humbled themselves so that Christ may increase in them and they may attain the fullness of His stature. These are the living icons who have died to the world and live the Kingdom on earth, fulfilling His glorious words, "The Kingdom of God is within you."
Today, we raise the holy icons in the midst of the church and carry them in a solemn procession, commemorating the Church's resurrection from one of the most significant heresies that attempted to destroy it. But in truth, we are processing with our own souls and bodies, which are the true icons that the Lord desires as His image and dwelling place. "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him; for God's temple is holy, and you are that temple... Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?" (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, 6:19). This living icon is worthy of all honor and respect.

Not only in Orthodoxy, but in all of our lives. This is the icon we must be careful not to allow heretics to destroy, drag through the streets, insult, and trample upon, as they did with the icons of the Lord, the Virgin Mary, and all the righteous saints. For, as Saint Paul says, “You are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people’” (2 Corinthians 6:16). Can anyone defile the temple of God and His dwelling place? Do we care more for a temple made of stone and wood than for the temple fashioned and created by the hands of God? Should this true icon be harmed by vain desires and wicked passions, or by suicide, murder, or any other form of injury?

This reverence is not only for our own icon, that is, for ourselves, but for every person whom the Lord created in His image and likeness (a living and
speaking icon of Him). Since God willed that each person exist, who are we to negate, marginalize, or harm them intellectually, physically, or even psychologically? This is how we live out love for our neighbor as a model of our love for God, and of God's love for us. "By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers" (1 John 3:16).

This is what the disciple whom Jesus loved (John the Beloved) says, the one who leaned on Jesus' breast at the Last Supper, overwhelmed with sorrow that the Lord was about to leave them to suffer. His love did not allow him to imagine his Master suffering, a love that led him to the foot of the cross to bid farewell to his Jesus and to embrace the grieving Virgin Mother, heartbroken over her only Son, until her repose, casting aside all fear of death and suffering, as he himself says: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love" (1 John 4:18).

This is the meaning of this first Sunday of Great Lent: the "Sunday of Orthodoxy." Amidst this world, despite all the trials we face, the Church calls us to be people who preserve our true and correct faith, walking in righteousness and piety, so that we may be men and women without deceit in the eyes of the Lord. We are called to accept our weaknesses and our circumstances, and to be courageous in reconciliation and forgiveness—first with ourselves, then with others, and finally with God. In this way, we become people without deceit, following the example of Nathanael.

Fr. Ghassan Haddad.