Over at Reluctant Vegan, I write about how I've more or less stumbled onto eating a sharply reduced daily diet -- not a requirement of the fast -- and how it's taught me that I really don't need as much food to get by as I thought I did. Disclosing the vast difference between what I want and what I need is my primary experience of the fast so far. Also: last night I had my first dream of eating meat -- and a celebrity arrived unexpectedly to chastise me. Clearly, I am crazy.
Daily bread and dreaming of meat
Thursday March 20, 2008
Categories: Orthodoxy
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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I learned a long time ago that there is a difference between being actually hungry and just wanting to eat something; someone once called the latter "mouth hungry". I keep re-learning this lesson in various ways, over and over again. If we aren't actually getting hungry a couple of times a day, we probably are eating too much food, and certainly too much 'stuff'. In fact, keeping 'stuff' out of the house entirely makes life easier in a lot of ways.
There appear to be some useful things about fasting in the physical sense (search on "calorie restriction") as well as in the spiritual sense. I like Don's comment about fasting reminding us of our ultimate source of sustenance, too.
Actually, reducing the amount of food IS a requirement of the fast. Alas, many of us Orthodox often only abstain from animal products, alcohol and olive oil without reducing the amount by much if any; and that is falling short of the full observance. After all, it's called "The Great Fast," not "The Great Vegan Venture." In Orthodox monasteries where the ideal is more frequently striven for, only one meal a day is served on the weekdays of the Great Fast. So, allowing wine and oil with two meals a day on the weekends is a huge consolation. And FISH on Annunciation? WOW!
As I recall, the older Western fasting rules still in force before Vatican II also explicitly called for reducing the amount of food to two half meals and one full meal a day, but with only flesh meat being off limits three days a week. Or something like that. The older the Western fasting guidelines you look at, the more they look like Orthodox fasting guidelines. For example, the Rule of Saint Benedict prohibits meat for monks period, exactly as in the East; and Advent was kept as a fast; and the eves of Christmas and Epiphany were kept as strict fasts exactly as in the East. And every Wednesday and Friday were fasts. Serious fasting was a part of the Christian ethos from the very beginning, being inherited from Jewish practice and expanded upon in imitation of Chirst's forty days in the wilderness.
As an interesting aside, when Orthodox Missionaries evangelized Alaska, they didn't stress fasting because life there was just too harsh. If a caribou wandered into the village in Lent and you were hungry, then you killed it, gave thanks, and ate. I imagine that fasting guidelines in the West loosened up when, say, Rome fell and centuries of invasions and wars began. But that's another topic.
Anyway, I strive to look at my own plate, not anyone else's.
...and lest fasting be turned into an idol, remember that nobody eats less than the demons.
Yes, as Roman Catholic lent draws to a close, I'm a little surprised that it's not really as hard to go carne-vale as I thought it'd be.
But nonetheless, I've been wanting bratwursts so badly for the last 6 weeks that our little dachshund is getting nervous.
Yes, like you, I learned through the rigors of the Orthodox fast that I do not need nearly as much food as I think I do, or as I was accustomed to eating. The trick is remembering this once Pascha has come and I've gorged myself on every kind of kielbasa, cheese, and BBQed/roasted meat I can lay my hands on. The 3 full meals a day + snacks routine returns rather quickly after the Fast, and it's hard to remember that one need not eat so much.
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