Prayer and Fasting
What is Great Lent?
Great Lent is the major fasting season that prepares the Church for Holy Week and the Feast of the Resurrection. It follows Christ's forty-day fast and adds the preparation week and Holy Week, giving the faithful a long school of repentance, prayer, Scripture, and self-denial.
When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.
Why It Is More Than A Diet
The food discipline is real, but Great Lent also calls the person to confession, forgiveness, almsgiving, church attendance, Scripture, and prayer. A person can keep the menu and miss the fast if the heart does not turn toward God.
Turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.
What You May Notice About Great Lent
Services may feel more penitential. Hymns may change. The Church reads and prays with a more urgent call to repentance. In Holy Week, the services become longer and more focused on the Passion of Christ.
How To Enter It
Enter Great Lent through the Church's life: attend services, pray from the Agpeya, confess, seek reconciliation, give alms, and receive guidance for the fast. The food discipline matters, but it serves the deeper return of the whole person to God.
- Why the Great Fast Is 55 Days, Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States Q&A. Pastoral answer on the structure of the Great Fast and Preparation Week.
- The Meaning of the Great Lent, Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Los Angeles. Diocesan reflection on Great Lent as repentance, renewal, prayer, and fasting.
- Fasting, Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States. Catechetical lecture on the purpose, order, and spiritual discipline of fasting.
- Coptic Fasts and Feasts, Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States. Diocesan calendar resource for annual feasts and fasts.
Great Lent: The major fasting season before Holy Week and the Resurrection Feast, ordered around repentance, prayer, fasting, and return to God.
Pascha: The holy week of Christ's Passion, Crucifixion, burial, and Resurrection, marked by intense Scripture readings, hymns, fasting, and prayer.
Confession: The sacrament of repentance in which a person confesses sins before God in the presence of the priest and receives absolution and guidance.
Agpeya: The Coptic Book of Hours, a daily pattern of psalms, Gospel readings, and prayers that teaches the day to return to Christ.