The idea that any Westerner has about fasting is strongly linked with renunciation, with giving-up, with sacrificing something for God. In the Eastern Orthodox Church however, fasting achieves a much richer meaning. Fasting is not only about giving-up, but it is actually more about gaining, about being able to reach things that are possible only through this spiritual exercise.
In a legalistic understanding of salvation some believe that Christ has come on earth to fulfill a duty, to repair an offense that man has brought unto God. His sacrifice on the Cross satisfies this need and mankind enters again in God’s favors. From this perspective fasting is a similar symbol: a personal sacrifice that one makes to step back into God’s grace. This can be anything ranging from giving up chocolate to abstaining from Facebook for the Lenten period. But such frivolous renunciations really don’t cut it into the genuine meaning of fasting. God doesn’t need any of these sacrifices as He does not need the whole burnt offering of the Old Testament anymore. It is us, not God, who need the fasting rule.
Reducing the fasting to a symbol, to a mere idea of fasting, the entire exercise of Great Lent is perverted. Fasting becomes a theoretical notion that can be achieved through an act that involves little or no effort because, at the end, is not the fasting that is important, but only the idea of fasting. This intellectual reduction is yet another symptom of our brokenness, of the ontological separation between mind and heart. The mind creates an entire new reality that we confuse many times with the true authenticity of existence that only a heart open to God can see.
In this world, made-up by our minds saturated with secular values, the importance of the complete involvement of the body in fasting is forgotten, because for the mind a symbol is enough. But man does not exist in a fantasy of the mind, but lives in the real world, as a true person, body and soul, both physical and spiritual.
Christ came to save the world not by spreading only the idea of salvation, but coming down Himself, taking body from the Virgin Mary and physically becoming one of us; not a ghost, not a spirit, but flesh and bones. His death on the cross was not a symbol, but a painful reality. His resurrection was not a simple story full of morality, but the defining moment of a new stage in human existence. By reducing everything to symbols we end up living in our minds and missing genuine life.
In the Orthodox understanding man is utterly aware that living in a physical world, with a corrupted and fallen nature, the body is subject to passions that affect the state of his entire being. Controlling the body through fasting directs the entire human being towards God, because “a body subdued by fasting brings the human spirit freedom, strength, sobriety, purity, and keen discernment.” (St. Ignatiy Brianchaninov). In a paradoxical way by starving the body the entire human being is nourished spiritually and is able to “ascend on high, to contemplate lofty things and to put the heavenly higher than the pleasant and pleasurable things of life.” (St. John Chrysostom).
We don’t want however to reduce the experience of fasting to a mere vegetarian diet. The Great Lent is a period of total transformation, of metanoia, as the Greek fathers call it. The faster should strive to change his or hers entire way of life, redirecting priorities, seeking new avenues to God, striving for perfection in Christ. As St. Basil the Great says “True fasting lies in rejecting evil, holding one’s tongue, suppressing one’s hatred, and banishing one’s lust, evil words, lying, and betrayal of vows.”
From this perspective we can truly say, paraphrasing St. John Chrysostom, that fasting of the body is a feast for the soul. A soul liberated from the weight of an overfed body and nourished with the manna of virtues can reach into the spiritual heights, free of the passions that drag it to the ground. Such a soul can pray more, can forgive more, can love more. Fasting is not a simple renunciation but an exercise of love, as salvation is not an honor satisfying sacrifice but the greatest act of love ever seen.
Tags: Chocolate · East · Fasting · orthodox · Symbol · West3 Comments
In the last month two stories of violence against Orthodox priests caught the Orthodox news channels attention. One happened in Russia and one here, on American soil.
You have done well for repenting right away. God has left repentance for salvation. If that was not the case, not even the Apostles would have been saved, far less other people. You have sinned with the tongue, repented with the heart. You said an evil word against your neighbor. As if you threw a spark into dry straw. The whole village heard it and made a mockery of it. The neighbor was bitter and sued you. You paid a lot, and became more miserable. You are bitter with yourself. It is not so hard for you that the court has punished you, but it is hard that your offended neighbor keeps punishing you. He does not wish to speak with you anymore. He keeps quiet and turns away from you. What should you do?
Yury A. Fedorov was born in the city of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) on September 28 1953; he was educated at the Department of Physics and Mechanics of the Polytechnic Institute; he also attended evening drawing and painting classes at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. After serving in the army (airborne troops), he worked at an oncology research centre; later, Fedorov devoted himself entirely to creating crosses and carved church ritual items, and to studying staurography (crosses and their design) and Byzantine and Old Rus-Ukraine art. He participated in archaeological excavations and helped organize Christian art exhibitions. In 1995, he showed his art at the World Miniature Art Exhibition held in London; since 1996 he has been collecting Christian ritual and other religious objects. He is the founder of the Maysternya Yuriya Fedorova Jewellery Studio.
impelled him to take a closer look. The more he looked, the more he felt their magnetic force — and at one point he was overwhelmed by realization that those icons and crosses lived a secret life of their own. Fedorov began creating his own icons and crosses, and he did not have to start from scratch — since his childhood he had been drawing, painting and carving wood. At first, he was not satisfied with the result of his artistic endeavours. As far as the form was concerned, his icons and crosses looked quite the way such things should look, but he felt the right content was missing. He began to attend drawing and painting classes at the Repin Art Institute; he studied Byzantine and Old Rus art. But the desired breakthrough occurred only when Fedorov discovered Christian faith. He came to believe in one God, creator of the heaven and earth.
As an artist, he knows to perfection all the Church canons, symbols and traditional imagery. He believes that only in closely following them, a religious artist can fully reveal the essence of the Christian teaching and Church sacraments. In his opinion, the main difference between secular and ecclesiastical art lies in regarding art not as an end in itself but a way to express the spiritual content of the soul, and as a way of coming to know God. That is why, he says, the Beauty should be regarded as one of the manifestations of God, and aesthetical principles as a spiritual exercise; the artistic skills and technique should be subservient to the spiritual task the artist wants to fulfil. Otherwise, Fedorov argues, instead of religious art, “we shall have ritual objects.”
Obraz khresta presents the story of the origin and symbolism of the cross in an engaging manner. Fedorov describes the different forms and shapes of the Christian crosses and their use in church and in daily life. Being an artist who makes crosses himself, Fedorov devotes meticulous attention to the crosses that are supposed to be worn around the neck on the chest. Christian crosses and crucifixes reflected the iconographic traditions and aesthetical principles of the times when they were created, preserving at the same time their supertemporal character — the cross symbolizes the unity of the faithful with the Christ and with Church, presents in a symbolical and generalized manner the very essence of the Christian faith, and glorifies the Holy Church and the sacrifice of the Saviour. Also, pieces of the Life-giving Cross were sometimes regarded as charms, talismans with magical properties, but such an attitude to the cross was condemned by the Church as being too close to paganism.
On the first Sunday of the Great Fast our Church celebrates the triumph of Orthodoxy, the victory of true Christian teachings over all perversions and distortions thereof- heresies and false teachings. On the second Sunday of the Great Fast it is as though this triumph of Orthodoxy is repeated and deepened in connection with the celebration of the memory of one of the greatest pillars of Orthodoxy, the hierarch Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, who by his grace-bearing eloquence and the example of his highly ascetic private life put to shame the teachers of falsehood who dared reject the every essence of Orthodoxy, the podvig (in an approximate translation the word podvig means “spiritual struggle”) of prayer and fasting, which enlightens the human mind with the light of grace and makes it a communicant of the divine glory.
