Great Lent this year begins March 3. Our journey to Pascha, is a spiritual pilgrimage, a time of cleansing and renewal, a reaffirmation of our liberation from the power of sin and materialistic values. This very special time of spiritual endeavor and effort calls us to spiritual awakening and renewal. Salvation remains always a gift of God, but our acceptance of that gift requires our personal response to God in faith. Our good works, our prayer, our fasting, our self-denial, our almsgiving, our struggle to keep the commandments are the means of cultivating our faith and responding in a very committed and personal way to our Savior, by putting Him first in our lives, where He belongs and wants to be.

It is with this in mind that the following thoughts are offered. They are taken from “Love Without Limits” by Fr. Lev Gillet, who wrote under the pen name, “A Monk of the Eastern Church.” In a very personal and intimate style, Fr. Lev writes about the believer’s relationship with Christ in a way that speaks directly to one’s heart. May his words speak directly to our hearts.

• Whoever you are, whatever you may be, says the Lord of Love, my hand is resting upon you at this very moment. I have never ceased loving you, speaking to you, or calling you.
• Often you did not hear this call, because you were not listening. At other times you perceived it, but in a vague and confused way. Occasionally you were ready to respond with acceptance. And sometimes you gave me that response without any lasting commitment. You were deeply moved to hear me but recoiled from the decision to follow me.
• Yet now, once again, I come to you. Hear, then, what my lips want to speak to you in hushed tones – what they want to murmur to you. I am your Lord, the Lord of Love. Do you want to enter into the life of Love?
• Do you wish to become someone other than who you have been, someone other than who you are? Do you wish to be someone who lives for others, and first for that Other and with that Other who calls all things into being? Do you wish to be a brother to all, a brother to the entire world?
• My child, you have never known who you really are. You do not yet know yourself. I mean, you have never really known yourself to be the object of my Love. As a result, you have never known who you are in me, or all the potential within yourself.
• Awake from this sleep and its bad dreams!  In certain moments of truth, you see nothing in yourself but failures and defeats, setbacks, corruption, and perhaps even crimes. But none of that is really of you. It is not your true “I” the most profound expression of your true self.
• It is you that I love. It’s not the evil you do – the evil that we can neither ignore nor deny nor lessen. But underneath it all, at a greater depth, I see something else that is still very much alive.
• Hear me. No one truly understands you. But I understand you. I can speak about you such wonderful, marvelous things! I can say these things about you. Not about the “you” that the powers of darkness have so often led astray, but about the “you” who is as I desire you to be, the “you” who dwells in my thoughts as the object of my love. I can say these things about the “you” who can still be what I want you to be, and to be so visibly. Become visibly, then, what you already are in my mind. Realize all the potential I have placed within you.
• Whatever you may have done in the past, I will set you free, I will loose your bonds; and if I loose your bonds, who can prevent you from rising up and walking.