Fasting from Food, Activity, and Noise of the Modern World on Great and Holy Friday

In the Christian world, we use the word "passions" to describe tendencies that each person has that lead us to sin. Each of us has a "passion" for anger, lust, power, greed, ego, etc. We do not get through life without wrestling with each of these, sometimes on a daily basis. The most basic "passion" is hunger. While we can go a day without a lustful thought or an angry thought, we can't go more than a few hours without a hungry thought. So, if we can or tame our passion for eating, we can hopefully tame our other passions. If we can discipline ourselves to go without certain kinds of food, we can hopefully discipline ourselves so that we can go without certain kinds of behavior that are spiritually destructive. Thus, fasting is not about giving up something only to get it back. Fasting is about getting control of our passions, maintaining control over them, and ultimately giving control of ourselves to God.

”We know that the earliest Christians fasted because there are rules in one of the oldest Christian books. The Didache is a book of Christian doctrine as old as parts of the Bible. It says, ’Do not fast on Tuesday and Thursday as the Pharisees, but on Wednesday and Friday.’ Today, we probably would not consider that a very good reason for choosing those days, but now you know that the earliest Christians did fast on Wednesday and Friday, just as people did in our church until the newest generations. How did people lose a tradition that was so ancient and continuous? Some say it is because of the modern Western heresy that the flesh is not important. In recent years I have heard well-meaning people repeat the misleading slogan, ’You are a spiritual being having a human experience.’ In other words, your spirit is important, but your flesh is hiding your spiritual nature. That slogan is simply incompatible with our beliefs as Christians. God made us from the beginning with a body and a soul, and both of them together make us who we are. Just as we must discipline our spirit and our mind, we must also discipline our flesh. Our most basic desires are the desires to breathe, to drink, and to eat. We can’t stop breathing, though we can train it. We can’t stop drinking for very long without ruining our health. So, we follow the example of Jesus and we fast to discipline our flesh. If we can control this most basic of our desires, then it becomes easier to tame the other passions. Although our faith teaches that our flesh is important and essential, we cannot allow it to rule our whole person.”

”In our tradition, each year we celebrate Meatfare Sunday, and then a week later, we celebrate Cheesefare Sunday. They are called that for a reason. Meatfare Sunday is the last day to eat meat before Easter. Cheesefare Sunday is the last day to eat dairy products before Easter. How many people in our society are promoting a ’plant based’ diet nowadays? It is even promoted in our schools. Yet, these same leaders mock Christian discipline. They call us killjoys, and then they promote the same discipline for worldly reasons. The reason that we have our Easter baskets is that those are the very foods that were avoided for the fast of Great Lent: meat, butter, cheese, and eggs. When we all fast as a group, we are fasting as the Body of Christ which is the Church.”

You know we should also be fasting from noise and sound, right?

The enemy of your soul loves nothing more than to clutter your mind and heart with random bits of sound and information to crowd out the holy hush that makes space for hearing our Father’s singing over your spirit. Today, on this Great and Holy Friday and into the Great Feast of Pascha, we should also fast from noise and embrace the voice of the Lord.

Turn off the television, the radio, the apps on your phone. Do not fill these final Great and Holy days with shopping and the other soulless activities of the modern, secular world. These are the three holiest days of our liturgical year. Our hearts, minds, and ears should be focused on one thing... preparing ourselves for the Great Feast of the Resurrection. So, fast accordingly from food, activity, and noise. Read scripture, sing liturgical hymns, be still and quiet.