The Great Fast gives is a sense of responsibility for our life, a vision of ourselves before God in the light of eternity, together with an acute consciousness of our sins, as if a last judgment upon ourselves. The light of the Great Fast penetrates the darkness of our souls. The joy of the spiritual knowledge gives birth to a ‘sorrow in relation to God’ and calls us to the labor of repentance, arduous and enervating but also healing and salvific.
–Sergius Bulgakov, Churchly Joy. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 2008), 73.
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