Life in the Fast Lane
How to Fight for the Body While Forgetting About Ourselves
by Adam A. J. DeVille
One cannot turn on the electronic pulpit that is the television today without being regularly hectored by the preachers and proselytizers of the latest fad diet. Whether you should bulk up on fiber to stave off colon cancer, or throw out “carbs” in favor of all the protein you want, or sign up for a course that will allow you to drink a chocolate shake three times a day and still be fifty pounds lighter in a month, is all up to the discretion of the woefully befuddled individual.
Our culture is fascinated with—indeed, agonized over—the place of food and the health of the body. Christians are not exempt from these influences. How strange, then, that we rarely, if ever, hear from the pulpit any reflection on fasting.
The consequences of the neglect of such ascetic practices as fasting are not to be underestimated. Many churchmen today seem to believe in a “Christianity Lite,” premised upon the fiction that the best way to reach the so-called modern world is not to propose a serious, disciplined, time--consuming religion. Instead, they make minimal demands and therefore get minimal, often spectacularly pathetic, results.
The paradox is this: Ask a little, get less; butask a lot, and get more. People want to be challenged; people are waiting, sometimes eagerly, to make what Pope John Paul II calls the “total gift of self.” They simply need to be asked—and if the Church does not ask them, they may follow someone who does. The astonishing growth of Mormonism with its disciplines and demands is proof enough of this.
Here my own tradition may provide some guidance. (I propose this not in a triumphalistic manner, because so many Orthodox, especially those in North America, have also abandoned the tradition of fasting or have only the shallowest understanding of it.)
Orthodox believers are expected to fast each Wednesday and Friday (a practice for which some evidence is to be found as early as the Shepherd of Hermas, written about A.D. 120), since Christ was betrayed on the former and died on the latter. The Orthodox tradition also offers four major fasting periods in the year:
• The pre-Christmas fast—popularly known as St. Philip’s Fast because it begins after his feast on November 15th—which lasts for 40 days prior to the celebration of the Nativity of Christ.
• The Great Fast of Lent, the longest, most solemn, and most important of the fasting seasons, beginning at Forgiveness Vespers prior to Pure -Monday, lasting for 40 days prior to Palm Sunday, and then being followed by a still more rigorous observance for Holy Week itself.
• The Apostles’ Fast, generally running for about two weeks before the celebration of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29th.
Adam A. J. Deville is a Ph.D. student at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute for Eastern Christian Studies at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Canada, where he is writing a thesis on Orthodoxy and the Roman papacy in response to the papal encyclical Ut Unum Sint.
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