A New Opportunity is Before Us
Every year Great Lent comes around to disrupt our lives. It imposes on us what we don’t want to impose on ourselves, discipline, renewal, focus, and good habits. Thank God for Great Lent.
Why fasting is so beneficial.
It’s not about deprivation or trying to hurt ourselves, or thinking food is bad and pain and suffering is good.
It’s about maintaining our spiritual health. The reason the Church has developed a series of feasts and fasts not only reflects the Liturgical calendar, it also establishes discipline in the hearts of the faithful. Obedience, submission, adherence to tradition, these all help us personally and collectively. As human beings we are prone to extremes and the practice of feasting and fasting helps us to maintain our balance. When we fast we take our focus off food and pleasure and free ourselves from the tyranny of ‘desire’. Food becomes a means to an end and not an end in itself. A lot happens when we fast-physically and spiritually. Spiritually we learn discipline and self-control. Physically, our thinking clears up and our bodies begin to function efficiently without excess calories, fats, sugars, etc. Diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and high blood pressure don’t gain a foothold. Technically Orthodox Christians should be amongst the healthies people on the planet if you just look at their diet.
The physical discipline of fasting help us to strengthen our will so that when it comes to resisting anything that would rob us of our peace and joy, we are able to fight. We can maintain our spiritual health by overcoming anxiety, temptation, fear, addiction and any other temporary condition that would seek to draw us away from Christ. Having persevered in fasting we know that we can also persevere in prayer and clinging to God in challenging times.
As we discover more and more about how we function as human beings in a physical sense e.g. dopamine, pleasure, sensory receptors, all those things that make us slaves to passions, we see that fasting as a practice helps us not be subject to our bodies, but rather subject our bodies to our will.
In that way we are not tossed about on the sea of ‘desire’, but rather keep desire in its proper place, behind Logos (reason) and anger (at injustice) and keep desire focused on desiring God. Once desire focuses on pleasing ourselves physically, then our passions are awaken, and Logos and Anger are subjected to physical desire or passions, we lose our minds and anger becomes self-centered as expressed in selfishness, inconvenience, and ego.
Therefore this time of Great Lent strengthens our position as created in God’s Image and gives us the possibility to become more and more like Him.
Let us renew and redouble our efforts in this Blessed season to devote time to our spiritual life and our ‘Freedom’ in Christ.
Have a blessed Lent,
Fr. Anthony