From Eden to the Upper Room: Walking Through Scripture from Great Lent to Pentecost
Introducing the Faces of the Fast – A Series on Seeking Theosis
“The whole of sacred Scripture is a treasury of remedies for the soul. Nothing has been written in vain. Everything that has been handed down to us is for our profit.” – St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew
There is a kind of reading that informs, and there is a kind of reading that transforms.
The first kind leaves you knowing more than you did before – a useful thing, not to be despised. The second kind leaves you different – unsettled in the best sense, as though something has been quietly rearranged in the interior of the self. But it is this second kind of reading the Church has regularly engaged in when she views the Scriptures as relevant to the liturgical year. She isn’t just relaying info about God. She is also creating the environment in which God will work upon us through that sacred text.
Great Lent is, above all else, an invitation to that kind of encounter.
This series – Faces of the Fast – is an attempt to accept that invitation seriously, and to extend it across the entire arc of the liturgical journey from the opening of the Great Fast to the Feast of Holy Pentecost. It will do so not through doctrinal exposition or systematic theology, although they are both valuable and important, but through something more immediate and perhaps more searching: the faces of men and women in all their complexity in the whole canon of Scripture; the faces illuminated, in dramatically contrasting ways, by the same human condition we carry into church every time we bow our heads to say O Lord, open my lips.
Before the series proper begins, it seems right to say clearly what it is, what it is not, and where it intends to take us.
The Shape of the Journey
The liturgical year, according to the Orthodox tradition, is hardly a calendar so much as a cosmos. This is a deliberate re-entry into this entire narrative of salvation, a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and a destination. What makes that season stretching from Great Lent through the Feast of Resurrection to the Feast of Pentecost so extraordinary in the first place, is that it includes – in singular form – the full grammar of that story.
It starts with recognition of exile – the soul’s separation from God, from the Fall of the first Adam and proven in every sin our own lives have committed. It travels through the long pedagogy of repentance and waiting, through suffering and endurance, through the rending confrontation with divine mercy. It reaches the Cross and the empty grave. And then – and this is where most Lenten series stop, except where this one will not – it continues the fifty luminous days of Paschaltide or the Season of Resurrection, through the Ascension, to where it finally arrives in the Upper Room where the Spirit descends and the Church is born.
From Eden to the Upper Room. From exile to indwelling. From the first breath God breathed into the dust of Adam to the last, culminating breath – He breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit – and beyond that to the rushing wind of Pentecost.
That is the arc this series will follow.
Why Read Scripture Through Faces?
But pause to ask that question because the answer determines everything that comes after it.
The Scriptures contain commandments, prophecies, wisdom literature, apocalyptic visions, letters, and hymns. Any of these could serve as the organising thread of a Lenten series. But the choice to organise this journey around persons – specific men and women marked by identity and history, given the time we spend together and specific, unrepeatable encounters with God – is not by chance. It reflects something the Fathers understood with great clarity: that God, in the economy of salvation, works not in abstractions but through persons.
In his old age, he does not send Abraham a principle. He sends a promise, and then He comes Himself in the form of three visitors at the oak of Mamre. He does not provide Job a theodicy that explains his suffering from a safe philosophical distance. He speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, and the encounter itself – not the explanation – restores him. It is not a theological memo from him on the nature of the forgiveness that restores Peter. Over a charcoal fire on a lakeshore at dawn, he asks him three times: Do you love Me?
God works through persons because He is, in His own innermost life, a communion of Persons. And we are made in that image. We are relational creatures who understand our lives – our failures, our longings, our moments of grace – we understand them most intimately as they play out in the faces of others. This is why the Church has always read the lives of the saints and the figures of Scripture not as illustrations of doctrine but as living icons – faces in which we recognise something both of ourselves and of the God who refuses to abandon us to what we have made of ourselves.
That is what this series hopes to offer. Not a lecture. Not a programme. A gallery of faces, held up in the light of the Paschal season, and an invitation to linger before each one and ask: What do I see here? What does God see here? What does mercy look like when it reaches this particular life?
A Note on the Tradition We Are Reading Within
This series is written from within the theological and liturgical tradition of the Oriental Orthodox Church – specifically the Malankara (Indian) tradition with its deep Syriac roots – and it will draw extensively on the patristic and hymnographic resources of that tradition. The voices of St. Ephrem the Syrian, St. Jacob of Serugh, St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Isaac the Syrian, and others will be regular companions through these reflections.
This is not exclusivity. The riches of the Alexandrian, Antiochene, and broader patristic tradition belong to every Christian who approaches them with reverence. But it is honesty about where this writing stands, and about the specific lens through which Scripture is being read here. The Syriac tradition in particular brings to biblical interpretation a poetic sensibility, a richness of typological imagination, and a contemplative depth that seem especially fitting for a journey through the Paschal mystery. Where St. Ephrem writes of Paradise, or of Mary at the Cross, or of the soul’s hunger for God, there is a directness of imagery that bypasses the merely intellectual and reaches something deeper. That quality seems worth cultivating through a series like this one.
Readers from other traditions – Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, or those still searching – will, it is hoped, find much here that is recognisable, nourishing, and worth engaging with on their own terms.
The Eight Movements of the Series
The entire series is structured around eight broad movements, each corresponding to a dimension of the Paschal journey. What follows below is a brief description of each movement and its animating question.
Movement I – The Wound We Share: Exile and the Fall
Before repentance can begin, the condition requiring it must be honestly named. This opening movement resists the temptation to begin in comfort. It sits, with Adam and Eve, in the moment after the gate has closed behind them, and asks: what has been lost, and why does it matter that we feel that loss? It will also reflect on Cain – not as a monster but as a portrait of what happens when the soul refuses to acknowledge its wound – and on Noah, who found grace at the very end of the world’s endurance.
The animating question: What have we lost, and are we willing to feel the weight of it?
Movement II – The Long Road of Trust: Faith and Waiting
Lenten asceticism is not a productivity exercise. It is, at its heart, a training in surrender- in learning to hold loosely what we have built, and to trust in a God whose timetable bears no resemblance to ours. The patriarchal narratives are the great school of this disposition. Abraham and Sarah waiting in their old age. Hagar discovering that God sees the abandoned and the marginalised. Jacob wrestling through the night and emerging blessed but wounded. Hannah weeping in wordless prayer at Shiloh.
The animating question: Can I trust what I cannot yet see?
Movement III – The Weight of Suffering: Endurance, Lament, and Surrender
Lent is honest about pain. The tradition does not demand that we suppress grief or perform contentment we do not feel. This movement holds space for the soul’s honest cry – not as a failure of faith, but as a form of prayer. Job, Elijah, Jeremiah, and Esther are our guides here, each modelling a different aspect of what it looks like to endure suffering without either despairing of God or pretending the pain is not real.
The animating question: Can I bring my darkness to God, rather than hiding it from Him?
Movement IV – The Broken and the Restored: Repentance and Mercy
This is the heart of the series. These are the lives defined not by their failure – for all have sinned – but by what happened in the moment of turning. David and his psalm of broken contriteness. Joseph forgiving those who sold him. Jonah in the depths. Peter weeping in the courtyard. The woman who washed the Lord’s feet with her tears. The prodigal who came to himself in the far country and began the long walk home. The thief who turned his head and asked to be remembered.
The animating question: Is it possible that mercy is even larger than my failure?
Movement V – Faces at the Threshold: Encounters with Christ
As the series approaches Holy Week, it draws close to those who encountered the Lord directly and were undone and remade by that encounter – the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman with the issue of blood, Lazarus in his tomb, Mary of Bethany with her alabaster jar. And presiding over all of it, standing at the foot of the Cross with a sword through her soul, the Theotokos, Mother of God – whose Fiat at the Annunciation and whose faithful vigil at Golgotha are the supreme model of what kenotic love looks like from the human side.
The animating question: What happens to a person who truly meets Christ?
Movement VI – The Morning of the World: Resurrection Encounters
The Feast of Resurrection changes the register of the series entirely. The Resurrection is not a doctrine to be defended but an encounter to be received, and the risen Lord meets His own not in temples or palaces but in gardens, on roads, in locked rooms, at lakeside breakfasts. This movement follows Mary Magdalene weeping at the tomb and hearing her name spoken, the disciples on the road to Emmaus with their burning hearts, Thomas in his honest doubt, and Peter on the lakeshore being asked three times whether he loves the One he denied.
The animating question: Where does the risen Christ meet me, in the ordinariness of my own life?
Movement VII – Witnesses and Sent Ones: The Post-Resurrection Mission
The Resurrection does not gather its community inward into private consolation. It sends them outward, into the world, often at great personal cost. Stephen sees the heavens open as the stones fall. Philip runs alongside a chariot on a desert road and opens the Scripture to a man who had been deemed unworthy by the Law. Peter stands in the house of Cornelius and declares, with some astonishment, that God shows no partiality. The series moves toward the Ascension, reflecting on what it means to be a witness to a Lord who has ascended – present everywhere, visible nowhere, active in the Spirit through those He has sent.
The animating question: What does it mean to live as a resurrection witness in an ordinary world?
Movement VIII – Come, Holy Spirit: Pentecost and the Birth of the Community
The series closes where the Church begins. The Upper Room, fifty days after Pascha, and the Spirit descends like rushing wind and tongues of fire on a gathered community that includes the Theotokos, the apostles, and the women who had followed Christ from Galilee. Peter – who wept in a courtyard, who was restored on a lakeshore – stands up and preaches. Three thousand are cut to the heart and ask What shall we do? The same question with which Lent began – What is wrong with us, and what must be done about it? – receives its final, definitive answer in the outpoured life of the Spirit of the risen Christ.
The animating question: Am I open to the Spirit’s transformation, not just of myself, but of the community I belong to?
How to Use This Series
There is no single right way to engage with these reflections, but a few suggestions may be helpful.
Read slowly. Each post is intended to be sat with, not consumed. If a particular figure or a quotation from the Fathers catches something in you, stay there. Put the screen down. Pray with what has been opened. The series will still be here when you return.
Read alongside Scripture. Every reflection will be anchored in specific biblical texts. Before reading the reflection, read the passage. Read it aloud if you can – the Syriac tradition in particular was an oral, sung tradition, and the text has a different quality when it passes through the body rather than only the eyes.
Read in community if possible. These posts are written for personal reflection, but several of them could serve as the basis for a small group discussion, a family Lenten reading, or a conversation between friends walking through the season together.
And read to the end. The series is designed as a continuous journey. Each movement builds on the one before it. If you are here at the beginning for Great Lent, it is worth the commitment to stay through to Pentecost – because the full arc, from Eden to the Upper Room, says something that no individual post can say alone.
A Personal Word
I am not a theologian. I am not a scholar. I am someone in my mid-thirties who has grown up inside the Church, drifted at the edges of it more than once, and found himself returning – always returning – because nothing else has come close to answering the questions that actually keep me awake at night.
My serious reading of the Church Fathers began not out of intellectual curiosity but out of a kind of quiet desperation. There was a period where I was going through the motions of faith – fasting, attending services, saying the prayers – but feeling very little. The forms were there. The life inside them had thinned. I did not know what to do with that, and I was too proud to say it out loud.
It was St. Ephrem the Syrian who first cracked something open in me. Not through argument or doctrine but through poetry – images so direct and so strange that they bypassed whatever defences I had built up and reached something underneath. I did not fully understand what I was reading. But I felt met by it. That, I have come to believe, is how the Fathers tend to work on a person. Not by explaining God from a safe distance, but by pointing, urgently and personally, toward an encounter they had clearly lived themselves.
Since then, reading the Fathers has become less like studying and more like corresponding with people who understand the interior life in ways that most of my contemporaries – including me – do not have the language for yet. St. Isaac on the soul’s dry seasons. Chrysostom on failure and restoration. Jacob of Serugh on the women of Scripture who barely get named in our Sunday readings but whose lives, when you sit with them, are devastating in the best sense.
Lent, read alongside these voices, stopped feeling like a religious obligation and started feeling like something I actually need. The fasting, the prostrations, the long services – they are not performances. They are the body and the soul being brought into alignment around a single honest admission: I am not who I am meant to be, and I cannot fix that on my own.
That is where this series comes from. Not from having arrived anywhere, but from being genuinely on the road – mid-thirties, still figuring it out, still finding that the same passages from Scripture say something different to me now than they did at twenty-five, and will no doubt say something different again at forty-five. Still discovering, year on year, that the distance between who I am and who I am called to be is not an accusation. It is an invitation.
These reflections are my attempt to share what that journey has looked like so far – through the faces of men and women in Scripture who have, in different seasons of my life, felt less like ancient figures and more like mirrors.
Come, then. Let us walk this road together.
Your brother in Christ, Jobin
The first reflection – on Adam and Eve, and the wound we all carry – will be published this week. Each subsequent post will follow the movements outlined above, accompanying you through the liturgical season to Pentecost. You can follow the series by subscribing to Seeking Theosis, or by bookmarking this page, which will be updated with links to each post as they are published.
May this season be one of genuine return.
“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”
– St. Augustine, Confessions I.1
