Its Place in Lent

Where the Great Canon lives in the Church’s year: sung in four parts at Great Compline on the first four nights of Great Lent (Clean Monday through Clean Thursday), and then again in its entirety at the Matins of the Thursday of the fifth week — the service the people call the “Standing of St. Mary of Egypt,” when the Canon is read whole, together with the Life of the great penitent, as the long climb toward Pascha reaches its midpoint.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

Twice in the Fast

The Great Canon is heard at two moments of Great Lent, and the contrast between them is part of its meaning. At the opening of the fast, it is broken into four portions and sung across the first four evenings; at the approach of the fast’s end, it is sung whole, in a single long service. The Canon thus frames the central weeks of Lent: it sounds the keynote of repentance as the fast begins, and it gathers up that repentance again as the fast nears its goal (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware; Great Canon, OrthodoxWiki). On the season itself, see Great Lent.

The First Week: Clean Week

In the first week of Great Lent — “Clean Week” (Kathara Ebdomada), the week that opens with Clean Monday — the Great Canon is divided into four parts and sung at the service of Great Compline (Apodeipnon) on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware; Great Canon, OrthodoxWiki; orthochristian.com). Roughly a quarter of the Canon’s troparia is sung each night, so that the worshipper who keeps all four services has prayed the whole Canon across the week — the soul’s self-accusation laid out over the first four days of the fast, setting the whole tone of Lent at its very threshold.

The setting within Great Compline is itself eloquent. The portion of the Canon is chanted after the penitential psalmody — including Psalm 69 (LXX 68), “Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul” — and is immediately followed in the service by the great hymn “God is with us” (Meth’ hēmōn ho Theos, from Isaiah 8), so that the soul’s grief is at once met by the assurance of God’s abiding presence: the Canon does not leave the penitent alone with his sin but folds his lament into a service that ends in consolation (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware; orthodox-europe.org). Clean Week is the most austere stretch of the Orthodox year (in strict practice a near-total fast in its first days), and the Great Canon is its spiritual centre: the long, dim, candle-lit Compline services, with their refrain “Have mercy upon me, O God, have mercy upon me” and their repeated prostrations, are for many the very face of Lent (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware; on Clean Week, see Great Lent).

The Threshold of the Fast

The placing of the Great Canon at the very opening of Lent gives the season its keynote before anything else can. Great Lent is preceded by weeks of preparation — the Sundays of the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Last Judgment, and Forgiveness — that gradually turn the heart toward repentance; and then, with Clean Monday, the fast itself begins, and on that very first evening the Great Canon starts to sound (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware; see Great Lent). The effect is deliberate. The Church does not let the worshipper ease into Lent; she sets before him, on the first four nights, the most searching examination of conscience she possesses, so that the whole forty-day journey is undertaken in the spirit the Canon establishes. Whatever else a person does or fails to do in the fast, he begins it on his knees, hearing his own soul summoned to wake.

This is why the first-week Canon, though only a quarter is sung each night, is so formative of the Orthodox experience of Lent. For many of the faithful, the dim church, the slow chant, the refrain, and the prostrations of those first four evenings simply are the beginning of Lent — the threshold across which the whole season is entered.

The Fifth Thursday: The Standing of St. Mary of Egypt

The Canon’s second appearance is its great one. At the Matins of the Thursday of the fifth week of Great Lent — celebrated, by anticipation, on the Wednesday evening of that week — the entire Great Canon is sung in one service, the only occasion in the whole year on which it is read complete in a single sitting (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware; Great Canon, OrthodoxWiki; “The Standing of St. Mary of Egypt,” orthochristian.com). The people call this service the “Standing of St. Mary of Egypt” (in Greek, to Mega Apodeipnon gives way here to the Matins service often named ho Akathistos’s sister-vigil; popularly the “Mary of Egypt Standing,” Russian Mariino stoyanie) — “standing” because the long Canon is heard standing, through a service of great length (orthochristian.com; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware).

What makes the service distinctive is that the Canon is interwoven with the reading of the Life of St. Mary of Egypt, the harlot of Alexandria who became, after her conversion in Jerusalem, a desert ascetic of forty-seven years and the Church’s supreme icon of repentance. The Life — traditionally that attributed to St. Sophronius of Jerusalem — is read in two parts: the first part after the kathisma, and the second part after the third ode of the Canon (orthochristian.com; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware). The pairing is exact: the Great Canon is the theory of repentance, the soul’s self-examination against all of Scripture, and the Life of Mary of Egypt is its practice, a single human being who actually did what the Canon prays for. Set side by side, the abstract summons and the concrete example illuminate one another. It is for this that the received text of the Canon carries troparia addressed to St. Mary herself (see The Great Canon and St. Mary of Egypt).

The Bodily Discipline

The Great Canon is not only heard; it is done with the body. At the singing of its refrain — “Have mercy upon me, O God, have mercy upon me” — after each troparion, the worshippers make a prostration (metanoia), bowing to the ground and rising again, so that the whole congregation marks the soul’s repentance with the body’s repeated humbling. Because the Canon has on the order of 250 troparia, the practice yields, over the course of the complete reading, roughly 750 prostrations (the count given as approximately three hundred per the four-part Clean Week distribution and the full number on the fifth Thursday; orthodox-europe.org). The atmosphere of the services matches the discipline: the Royal Doors are closed, the lighting is kept dim, and the clergy serve in dark, penitential vestments, so that the darkness of the church becomes an image of the darkness of sin out of which the soul cries (orthodox-europe.org; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware). The Great Canon is thus a whole-bodied act of repentance — sung with the voice, heard with the ear, and worked out with the knees and the forehead against the ground — and its physical demand is part of why it is so deeply impressed on those who keep it.

Why Lent, and Why Twice

The placement is not arbitrary. Lent is the Church’s annual school of repentance, the forty-day ascent toward the Cross and the empty Tomb, and the Great Canon is the most concentrated text the Church possesses for the work the season exists to do. Placed at the start of the fast, the Canon opens the soul: it breaks up complacency, names the sins, and turns the worshipper inward before a single feast-day has passed. Placed near the end, on the fifth Thursday, it guards against the great danger of the long fast — that the penitent, weary and perhaps a little proud of his fasting, should lose the compunction with which he began. The whole Canon, sung again entire, with the staggering example of Mary of Egypt before the eyes, renews the tears and refreshes the resolve for the final climb through the sixth week and Holy Week to Pascha (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware; orthochristian.com). The Church, in other words, gives the Great Canon to her people both as the door into Lent and as the means of finishing it.

References

The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978 (repr. St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press) — the rubrics and texts for the Great Canon at Great Compline in the first week and at the Matins of the fifth Thursday, with the Life of St. Mary of Egypt.
Great Canon. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Great_Canon) — the four-part Clean Week distribution and the entire reading on the fifth Thursday; the interwoven Life of St. Mary of Egypt.
“The Thursday of the ‘Standing of St. Mary of Egypt’”; “Thursday of the Great Canon, with the Life of St. Mary of Egypt”; “The Standing of St. Mary of Egypt.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/120473.html; /52503.html; /168588.html) — the popular name of the service, the Wednesday-evening celebration, and the two-part reading of the Life (after the kathisma and after the third ode).
The Song of a Repentant Heart: The Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete. ROCOR Europe (orthodox-europe.org) — the prostrations (~750 across the complete reading), the closed Royal Doors and dim lighting, the setting within Great Compline (Psalm 69 and “God is with us”).
On the structure of Great Lent and Clean Week, see the repository entry Great Lent.