The role of fasting in Orthodox Christian Spirituality

The Lord God was pretty clear what fasting meant to Him:

 5 Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
       only a day for a man to humble himself?
       Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
       and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
       Is that what you call a fast,
       a day acceptable to the LORD ?

 6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
       to loose the chains of injustice
       and untie the cords of the yoke,
       to set the oppressed free
       and break every yoke?

 7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
       and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-
       when you see the naked, to clothe him,
       and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

 8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
       and your healing will quickly appear;
       then your righteousness ^[a] will go before you,
       and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

 9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
       you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
       “If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
       with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

 10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
       and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
       then your light will rise in the darkness,
       and your night will become like the noonday.   (Isaiah 58)

 The Orthodox Church certainly has placed a great deal of emphases on fasting as a normal part of Christian discipline.  This seems to be especially true because of the role monasticism has played in the history of Orthodoxy.  As Christians endeavored to take seriously being disciples of Christ, they looked for the ways and means to live out his teachings to take up the cross and to deny the self (Mark 8:34).  Combined with efforts to universalize some of the specific comments of Christ to individuals, such as “go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me”  (Matthew 19:21), Orthodox monasticism became viewed as the normative way to follow Christ. 

The monks who had given up all of their possessions to follow Christ consequently placed a lot less emphasis on charity as their main way of life, since they had in fact embraced voluntary poverty – they were in possession of nothing so they had little to give in terms of material goods.  Instead their emphasis came to be on personal self denial, abstinence, fasting from food, asceticism.   This also meant that to some extent specific teachings of Christ dealing with ministering to the hungry, to the thirsty, to the homeless, to the naked, were down played and emphasis was placed more on what the monks were better prepared to do – fast and pray.

This  has led in Orthodoxy to an almost exclusively monastic focus in the spiritual life, where Lent becomes a time of abstinence from food and increased prayer, with little mention of God’s proclamation on fasting found in  Isaiah 58.

 

But this monastic emphasis has from time to time been questioned by some Orthodox.  For example St. Maria Skobtsova, martyred by the Nazis in a death camp in 1945 was an outspoken critic of the exclusively monastic vision of Christianity that was virtually the sole focus of Orthodoxy of her day.      As St. Maria wrote commenting on the popular collection of Orthodox spiritual writings, the PHILOKALIA :  “we may note that in the first volume of the PHILOKALIA, material about the attitude toward one’s neighbor takes up only two pages out of six hundred, and in the second volume, only three out of seven hundred and fifty….  And we cannot say that it all refers to the direct question of fulfilling the commandment of the love of God – three-quarters of the remaining material in the PHILOKALIA speak mainly about fighting against gluttony, lasciviousness, and other passions.”

 

 We have to be honest that Satan is not very afraid when Christians refuse to eat meat and cheese – He never eats them himself.  Nor is he much bothered by people who keep kosher as he also never eats non-kosher foods.  But if all we accomplish during Lent is letting piles of eggs and cheese and meat go uneaten, we have done little in terms of the will of God.  For Christians all rules and regulations are supposed to be part of our love for God and love for neighbor, not for a love of keeping ritual.  But Great Lent should be a time where we lessen the burdens of others, not just unburden ourselves of the guilt we feel for not keeping the fast. 

 

Some have seen in the past several years that all of the attention members of the OCA have had to pay to dealing with scandals to have been a distraction from out true purpose in the Church  or during Lent.   But fasting is not the goal of Christianity, though certainly self denial is a work for Christians to engage in.    Great Lent is a time of repentance of our self centeredness and our self absorption.    It is the time allotted to us by the Lord to love one another and to bring an end to all of those behaviors of ours which oppress others.  Overthrowing despotic tyranny by bishops and exorcising the demons which infest the OCA and helping members to love one another and to reconcile to each other, now that would be a Great Lent.