The essence of Great Lent, which lasts six weeks and which leads us to Passion Week and to the Feast of Feasts, Pascha, can best be characterized as “sweet sorrow.” During this time period, which is sorrowful and at the same time exalted, the image of man’s sinfulness, his estrangement from God, appears especially clearly before him, and there sounds out a call to repentance, a call to what overcomes that barrier that man had erected between himself and God.
The Russian term pokayanie is a translation of the Greek concept of metanoia,...