Rehearsing eternity: Great Lent as an exit from dictatorship of noise
Great Lent is not a diet. It is not a seasonal ban on entertainment. It is a voluntary step into what might be called a corridor of silence – a place where a person removes the masks and finally encounters his real self.
Lent is a rehearsal for crossing from temporary existence into eternity. Imagine that the world – and everything in it – has been left behind. You have died and entered a kind of passageway linking the world of restless distraction to the world of eternal stillness. Everything you feared, worried about, lived for, clung to – is suddenly irrelevant.
In that corridor, there is no one but you. And yet you are not the version of yourself you saw reflected in the mirrors of society. You are who you actually are – stripped of roles, stripped of scenery, stripped of the masks you learned to wear so that others would respect you, or at least not think poorly of you.
There is emptiness there. And silence. That piercing silence most people instinctively avoid. Even when they escape to the countryside or go on holiday, they rush to drown it out with music, chatter, entertainment – anything but stillness. Because silence reminds the ego of its mortality.
The noise of the world – oxygen for the ego
The noise of the world is oxygen for egoism. The ego breathes through scrolling, breaking news, constant commentary, entertainment, curiosity. Emotional reactions to all of this are what make it feel alive. We eat our fear. We retreat into nostalgia. When living in the present becomes unbearable, we do not enter silence – we flee into familiar films, old books, comfortable memories.
Great Lent is an attempt to step into that “fatal” silence before the soul is forced to leave the body.
In a time of war, panic, information overload and fear, this is extraordinarily difficult. But we should ask ourselves: what weight do all these things carry compared to eternity? Everything that currently consumes us – everything that frightens us, exhausts us, angers us – could lose its relevance at any moment. The span of our lives is a microsecond measured against eternity.
A glimpse of eternal torment
Try, as far as you are able, to enter this silence. To do so, you must create an informational vacuum inside yourself. Shut off the channels. Block the constant inflow. For someone who carries no trace of divine stillness within, the experience will resemble eternal torment. They will discover that they are comfortable only inside infernal noise.
Without a smartphone, without the habit of condemning politicians or neighbors, without hatred toward whatever their mind has labeled evil, they may no longer feel like subjects of existence at all. Their sense of self depends on merging with external objects – fears, pleasures, emotional surges. Their identity is merely an echo of other people’s voices. On their own, they have never really existed.
Who am I without the scenery?
Ask yourself – honestly. Who am I without others? If my “self” is my profession, my social or family role, my anger, my inner monologues, what remains if all of that is removed? If family, status, national or civic belonging, even gender are stripped away – what is left? Have we ever dared to think about it? What survives once the stage props we call “life” are dismantled?
Meeting your true self is a grave and frightening trial – and one every person must face.
Even in this life, few are capable of choosing such a meeting. In the monastic tradition, only those already inwardly filled with God could enter total seclusion. Without that interior fullness, complete isolation often ended in breakdown. A single winter alone in the Caucasus mountains proved to be a crushing ordeal. Solitude may look like paradise in theory; in reality, it is the opposite.
Facing the monsters
When a person cuts off external noise, something else begins to surface – the monsters we have fed for years. These are the dark forces nourished by our fear, lust, gluttony, anger, pride. For them, the ego is simply a stomach.
Lent does not require total isolation – nor should it. But we can attempt, cautiously and honestly, to descend into ourselves. If we spend our lives floating on the surface of ego-driven noise while mechanically observing religious rules, our hope of salvation will remain abstract.
Only in inner silence can we begin to extract the monsters hiding in the depths.
Pull pride into the light, and you will see how swollen it has become – an internal organ so enlarged it suffocates the soul. Strip a person of comfort, recognition, power, and what remains? Often only a shadow. Many have glittered while basking in admiration, yet faded into nothing once applause ceased. The hero of the world’s mirror may appear small in the mirror of eternity. Pride always carries a form of foolishness, no matter how intelligent the person may seem.
The mirror of truth
The world constantly deceives us. One day we may realize we spent our entire life constructing scenery – and that realization will be painful. True humility is not a decorative virtue. It is basic clarity – seeing oneself as one truly is. It is radical honesty.
We should not fear looking bad in the eyes of others. We should fear losing contact with Truth.
From the room of silence, the world looks different. Life becomes a live broadcast with God. Every problem turns into a hieroglyph filled with meaning. “Can I remain human?” “Will I withstand this blow?” In every situation, God is not a judge on a distant bench, but a trainer in the ring – not condemning, but urging us forward. Each circumstance is material for growth. Hidden behind every trial is a blessing.
The vertical of meaning
If God is Love and Logos – Meaning itself – then Great Lent is an attempt to tune our inner receiver to that frequency. It is a movement from the horizontal line of “born, consumed, endured, died” toward a vertical axis of purpose.
That requires trust. The acceptance of events not as blind fate, but as material for transformation. The shift from asking “Why is this happening to me?” to asking “What is this teaching me?” Lent is a search for God in the unfolding of one’s own life. He does not wait for candles and incense; He waits for a change in the quality of our being.
And finally, Great Lent is an effort to create within ourselves a silence that allows us to hear God speaking in “a still small voice.” Only by killing egoism can we be filled with light – and discover that death has no final word.
We enter Lent as functional beings, defined by roles and reactions. We are called to leave it as beings of light – alive, free, and no longer ruled by the dictatorship of fear.
