The Great Canon is celebrated on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of the First Week and on Thursday of the Fifth Week of the Great Fast. The author of the Canon, St. Andrew of Crete, was born in the seventh century in Damascus, Syria. In 679, as secretary to the Jerusalem Patriarchate, he participated in the Sixth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople. Soon after the Council, St. Andrew remained in Byzantium and was ordained to the deaconate, served in the Great Church of Holy Wisdom (St. Sophia) . During the reign of Justinian II, he was consecrated bishop and promoted to the Archbishopric of Crete. He fell asleep in the Lord in the year 712. Saint Andrew was renowned in his time as a great preacher and composer of poems; his greatest and most revered text is the Scripture base Lenten Penitential which the Church knows today as the Great Canon.
The Great Canon stands at the commencement of the Great Fast as its inauguration, establishing the "tone" of repentance and conversion for the duration of the spiritual journey towards Holy Pascha, the Resurrection of the Lord. Repentance is what we must undertake once we have seen clearly within ourselves and have recognised that we are sinners. Conversion is the act of turning, of retracing one's steps, of returning to the heavenly Father, like the Prodigal Son. The Canon's penitential lamentations serve to shake our souls with the imponderable contradictions of despair and hope.
The opening of the lamentations begins on a deeply personal note:
How shall I begin to deplore the deeds of my miserable life?
What beginning shall I make, O Christ, to this lament?
One after another, with a unique beauty of language, St. Andrew interweaves the great Biblical themes - Adam and Eve, Paradise and Fall, Noah and the Flood, Moses and the Promised Land, the sin of David, and ultimately Christ and the Church - thereby revealing to us our own sinfulness in the deep connection of the human drama of man's relation to God.
The function and the purpose of the Great Canon is to reveal to us our sin and to lead us thus to repentance and conversion. These two goals of Lent are absolutely necessary for every believer, and without them spiritual life is in vain. The hope, the "lifeline" that St. Andrew offers us all in the lamentations is that although we may embark with great determination upon the struggle with sin and evil, we must not fear falling back into sin. With each fall, we must begin again with courage. For each fall teaches us humility ands helps us to direct our steps upon the path of repentance:
Even though I have sinned, O Saviour, I know You love mankind,
You do chastise with clemency, and show compassion with ardour,
You do perceive the tearful, and do hasten, as the father, to call Your prodigal
Persons who experience only one conversion in their life are very rare (this is the case with the thief upon the cross and with St. Mary of Egypt who is constantly beseeched to pray for us throughout the Great Canon). For all of us, we must constantly convert ourselves, we must begin again each day.
In order for the Canon to play a role in our spiritual journey through the Great Fast, a knowledge of the Bible is implied and the ability to share in the meditations on its meaning. St. Andrew's poetry does not stand alone, throughout it is girded with the strength of the Holy Scriptures. If today so many people find it dull and irrelevant, it is because their faith is no longer fed at the source of the Holy Scriptures. By re-entering into the world as revealed by the Bible, we connect ourselves to the history of redemption of all mankind, and there is no better way into that world than through the liturgical life of the Church which not only communicates biblical teaching but reveals the biblical way of life.
The lenten journey begins thus with a return to the beginning of all - the world of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, the world in which all things speak of God and reflect His glory, in which man finds the true dimension of life, and having found it, REPENTS.