March 29, 2004
Fast foods


As of yesterday, Easter is just two weeks away. That’s either fourteen days or a brief eternity, depending on your position. Either way, we are in the home stretch, pointed toward what the Orthodox consider the holiest day of the year.

And the closer we get to Easter (called Pascha by the Orthodox), the harder I must work to keep from drifting from its true purpose. On the really tough days, instead of being filled with anticipation of the holy days on the horizon, I am preoccupied with a drooly, lip-smacking joy about the end of the fast.

The ascetic roots of my religious tradition are revealed in splendid detail during Lent. The Orthodox spend nine weeks of Lent avoiding meat, poultry, dairy, seafood, wine, and even some kinds of oil. I remember thinking bitterly that first year we fasted: let’s see, that leaves us with… tofu and cabbage.

A few years after joining the church, I continue to be struck by how much these people love to fast. My priest relishes Lent; he looks forward to it with an enthusiasm that I find somehow disheartening. Who looks forward to such strict self-denial?

---

The fast is difficult to get my hands around. Usually, it takes me almost the entire length of the fast to get into it. I think of it kind of like an AA program. I have to work on it, again and again. I get on the wagon, I fall off. Repeat. Toward the end of Lent I’ve worked through the frustration and inconvenience of the fast, and I'm ready to jump in wholeheartedly. (Oh, look! It's already over!)

Technically, I am faithful to the fast. But practically speaking, I am terribly promiscuous. I wake in the morning from fresh dreams of forbidden food: barbecue sandwiches, butter pecan ice cream, nachos with cheese, and, of course, the chronic, big kahuna of all Lenten distractions: a really nice juicy burger with melted cheese. There I go, drooling again.

I can only chuckle at the persistent psychology of the fast: the things I can’t have become wildly desirable simply because of their inaccessibility. I would never drool over a simple Chick-fil-A sandwich, unless it’s two weeks before the end of Lent, in which case it might as well be Turkish Delight.

---

Frederica Mathewes-Green, one of my favorite Orthodox writers, writes with wit and clarity about fasting. I found one of her articles on Beliefnet a couple of weeks ago and it's been bouncing around in my brain during those meager 3:00 pm snack breaks.

She poses the obvious question: Why fast?

She suggests that we fast because food is a temporal part of a temporal world, and fasting reminds us of this.

“…All joys and pleasures on this earth are hors d'oeuvres,” she writes, “provided as a foretaste of the banquet to come. They let us glimpse where we're ultimately bound. Only a bad party guest would grab the tray from a passing waiter and hunker in a corner, stuffing every last mushroom cap in her mouth. Yet that's what we're tempted to do in this life, because although food, sex, entertainment, and such give only passing pleasure, at least they are under our control.”

Food, she points out, distracts us from this distressing reality. Why worry about what's around the corner? The pizza is hot!

“We'd rather chew those crusts than enter the ravishing joy we were made for," she says, "because, to tell the truth, it's frightening. In the brilliant light of God, the shadows stand out sharply, and we cannot avoid seeing our own failings and weakness. We see his overwhelming love and know it will not rest until we are wholly transformed, strengthened to endure that consuming fire.”

---

Stepping away from these foods for just a few weeks allows me to see in a small way what a grip they have on me. It opens my eyes to little ways I use food (or the radio, or the newspaper, or whatever) to insulate myself against discomfort, against hunger, against anything scary or difficult.

The fast is pretty powerful. Even at the low dosages I manage to self-administer, it's difficult, intense and meaningful work. My progress on the path is so slight that it might not even be noticeable to anyone else. But I catch good things happening sometimes, and I'm grateful for every little instance when my ears and my eyes are opened wider to the deeper truths of our fleeting world.