Forgiveness Sunday

Forgiveness Sunday is the last Sunday before Great Lent in the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches, also called Cheesefare Sunday because it is the last day on which dairy is eaten before the fast; the preceding Sunday, Meatfare, was the last for meat, so the diet is tapered over the final week rather than stopped at once. Its Gospel is Christ's teaching on forgiveness and on fasting in secret, and it recalls the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, framing Lent as a return.

The day is defined by the rite of forgiveness held at its close: the members of the community, often the whole congregation one by one, ask one another's forgiveness, each bowing and saying "Forgive me, a sinner", and answering "God forgives, and I forgive". The practice enacts the conviction that one cannot rightly enter the fast, or approach God, while at odds with a neighbour. Beginning the most demanding season of the year with mutual pardon rather than with resolutions gives Orthodox Lent a strongly relational opening, and the vespers that follow already sing in the plaintive Lenten tone.

In Russia and other Slavic Orthodox countries, the week leading up to Forgiveness Sunday coincides with Maslenitsa, a folk festival of pre-Lenten feasting centred on blini, thin pancakes eaten with butter and other rich toppings that will be given up for the fast, along with sledding, folk games and communal celebration that predates Christianity in the region and was absorbed into the run-up to Great Lent rather than replaced by it, so that a week of exuberant folk feasting ends on the very day the church specifically dedicates to mutual forgiveness and sober preparation for fasting.

Maslenitsa traditionally closes with the burning of a straw effigy representing winter, a folk rite of seeing off the cold season that has no direct Christian content of its own, performed on or around Forgiveness Sunday itself in many Russian towns and cities as a large public community event, so that the same calendar day can see, within a few hours of each other, a boisterous secular folk bonfire marking the end of winter and a solemn church service in which the same community individually asks pardon of one another before entering the year's most demanding fast.

The Vespers that open Great Lent on the evening of Forgiveness Sunday include a distinctive hymn known as Adam's Lament, sung as the clergy vest in the sombre purple or black of Lenten worship for the first time that year, in which the exiled Adam mourns his loss of paradise and pleads for mercy, giving liturgical voice to the very story of expulsion the day's Gospel reading recalls before the rite of mutual forgiveness that follows it.