St. Seraphim

Orthodox Fast at Thanksgiving

At Thanksgiving, we’re always greeted with rationalizations, prevarication, and even abuses of Scripture to justify breaking the Fast, and right in the middle of the Fast, too, which makes about as much sense as having a dance contest in the middle of a funeral.

Last year, I spoke to this – it’s just not an Orthodox thing to do. Get permission from some lax Bishop all you want – it’s not right, and we all know it, or should.

This year, I’d like to address the question underlying it all – a question that rarely but occasionally gets articulated in any actual way: “Can I be deified without fasting?” It’s rare that we’re as candid as that, especially when our intent is to violate the fast with a feast, and dress it up in cultural capitulation, blood and soil, patriotism and imperialism, or slavery to Protestant ‘bible’ hermeneutics. It is a Protestant and American holiday after all. In other countries, the Orthodox diaspora have their own national festivals to ignore. But it does get asked, on occasion, much to the chagrin of those who now have to dredge up references to “it’s better to love…” or “fasting without compassion is…”. Yeah, we know all that. And the implication of all of those statements is that it’s not one or the other, but both. The moment you claim it’s one or the other, you’re reading and talking like a Protestant, not an Orthodox. We dont’ do “either/or” – we do “both/and”. Let’s answer the question:

question: “Can I be deified without fasting?”
answer: Why would you be?

I mean, after all, it’s not like you’re being burned at the stake right now, and there’s no time to fast. It’s not like you’re starving to death and the great question is whether to eat a fish or not. You live in a Willy Wonka land of ubiquitous food. The lion’s share of all commercial entities surrounding you have some connection with processing, selling, delivering, or preparing food. A certain percentage of your neighbors are actually off giving food away. Nothing gets so much attention to the local panhandlers as a cardboard sign, “will work for food”. The nation is a temple to food. Gorging is the national pasttime. Even at other passtimes, they’re just not the same without food – sports and hotdogs, movies and popcorn, cubicles and office candy. For the religious, the Sunday buffet. For the non-religious, the Sunday brunch. If the population of the US were livestock, it would all make sense – the engine of the economy is largely driven by cramming as much feed into each individual as humanly possible. Yuppy fashion revolves around tasting the latest – steel cut, hand-rolled, fire-roasted, whatever – bad food dressed in the language of delicate exclusivity. More food is consumed in the US than in the rest of the world combined. There are whole groups of people who live off the food that’s thrown away, the piles of extra crackers, baskets of bread, garnishes and day-old donuts. And you ask, “Can I be saved without fasting?” Why would you be. You’d be just like everyone else. You’d be just going along on the great cultural mud-slide of consumption. Your concern is less salvation than salivation. Deification would be an afterthought – something to play at, philosophically, after your belly were full.

So, I think the clear answer is “No. You can’t be deified without fasting.” And even if someone could, that someone would not be you. In fact, in the context of cultural, there’s nothing so characteristically Orthodox as keeping Fast. We’ve (in many quarters) shaved our men’s faces, bared our women’s luxuriant hair, coated ourselves with makeup and colognes, installed benches from the Protestant meeting halls, hooked up amplifiers to our mediaeval organs, and whitewashed the walls where once the saints surrounded us. We’ve added security guards, parking attendants, paid choirs and singles groups. The number of our committees exceeds the number of attendees at vigils, most of which we’ve transformed into morning Easter and Christmas services, replete with the fashion parades and “come to our church” flyers that we’ve seen the local religionists doing all these years. And for all of that ridiculous capitulation, all of that religious prostitution, all of that whoring after the gods of of the dominant culture, there is one thing left that’s a dividing line between those who believe and those who don’t. Keeping the Fast.

It’s not for nothing that St. Seraphim said, “He who does not fast does not really believe in God, whatever else he may pretend.”

Can I be deified without fasting? There is no deification without the transformation of the body that fasting obtains.

For those with Protestant and Roman Catholic backgrounds, or who were educated in the religious environment in the US culture in general, it seems obvious that salvation is an internal thing, is salvation of the mind, or of the soul. At best, the body, in this attittude, is unimportant.

But this is heresy to the Orthodox. We *are* our bodies. Our bodies *are* us. And there is no salvation apart from deification of the body. And no deification, therefore, apart from the ascetic undertaking of the body. All of the fathers speak of all ordinary Orthodox people transforming the body through ascetic feats. To deny this, or sweep it under the rug, is to deny Orthodoxy itself and, if you’re doing that, why are you concerned about deification in the first place. Have your idols, and ask no further questions. But to even speak of deification, which is what all Orthodox tongues mean by “salvation”, we are talking of what our fathers have experienced, what the Saints have experienced, what Christ himself underwent for our sake, and what the Church has continually said we must undergo with him – the very crucifixion of our bodies, of which fasting is a preparation, a type, and a means.

And lest we wrap our idols with the purple of “thanksgiving”, there is no thanksgiving without mourning, no feasting without fasting, and no proper execution of either apart from the life of Christ, the life of the Church, her calendar, her history, and her movement. All such thanksgiving is a false thanksgiving, and is not honored by God. Sure, the heterodox may in ignorance of the truth achieve salvation before I do, and their many prayers offered incorrectly may be heard while mine are ignored, but we who are Orthodox have no excuse for throwing off what we have received as if to return to ignorance, when we have been enlightened. It is like the man who, as Kahlil Gibran describes, cultivates a limp, so that others may excuse him from work. If we cultivate pretense in order to excuse us from the Fast, how we can claim that thansgiving draws us to the feast?

The feast belongs to those who have fasted. Those who have not, don’t know what a feast is. There is no distinction in their minds. As St. Paul said of those who all speak and make sounds at once, or who babble prayers of gibberish, there is no way to experience prayer for them, because they can’t distinguish one thing from another. So it is with those who “feast” only and do not fast – they don’t really ever feast, either. They can’t know the significance of one activity from another, and therefore all activity is inaccessible to them. Lethargy of body results in lethargy of soul, and the dimming of both.

Our thanksgiving is not of one kind. Now is the time of preparation for the glorious Incarnation of God. Now we are in darkness. Now we are at the end of the history of man. Now we are on the verge of destruction. Now we are lean and the spirit which was given to us has gone out of us, and we are on our last leg in the world. But at such a moment, at such a dry time, at such a lean and hungry time, the God is about to be born and our hope not only renewed but the salvation of God, the deification from on high, to be among us.

At such a time, while we take stock of where our sins have brought us, what Death has done to us, and how without God we are, how we have run after so many idols, have ignored God’s commands, have broken his laws, have disdained his saints and prophets, is now the time that we become gluttons again and proclaim it a holiday? Those who are sensitive at all to what we are doing, as Orthodox, cannot do so. Now is the lean time, the Nativity Fast, the Little Lent, and we shun celebrations and cover ourselves with the ashes of sorrow, until the bright day when God comes to save us.

How will we know that day, if it is like any other day, even if it comes among us? If we’ve already been celebrating and feasting, how will we know any distinction when God is born? You see, we blather on about how Christmas starts earlier and earlier, and yet we have broken the Fast and started too early. We mumble about how Christmas has lost its meaning, and yet we have taken its meaning away in our own awareness, because we were acting as if any given day is a celebration. When Christmas arrives, therefore, are you and I really having Christmas at all? Is the Incarnation really real for us, when we haven’t felt the need for it? When we haven’t known any sorrow, is there any significance in joy? When we haven’t felt our lack, is there any meaning to fullness?

The Orthodox are fasting. We don’t expect the heterodox to do it. We don’t expect the nationalists to do it. We don’t expect the atheists to do it. And they will all be saved before I might – that’s the Orthodox attitude. But precisely because that’s our attitude, we do not stand distant from our own means of salvation – the Fast, the Church, the calendar, the life of Christ we live through every year. We don’t fill our bellies with the attitude that such things don’t matter. At that point, we cease to be asking Orthodox questions at all, and nothing we think or say about the Faith matters. We have ceased to affirm our own existence as bodily creatures and, in the court of logic, we’ve therefore removed the ground of our own assertions. To deny we exist is to deny that we have any thoughts at all, or anything to say. Therefore, listen: be Orthodox. Keep the Fast. Hold the line. Stand strong. It is not so great a thing to not be a weakling. It is only our normal lives, our confession of Faith. It is the love of Christ’s body. It is to say the same thing we say when we stand and say the Creed. For the one who doesn’t fast, all Creeds are gibberish, and Christ’s body and our salvation is inaccessible.

The Rule of Fasting and Eating are the same Rule

“It is not suited to everyone to follow a severe rule of abstinence from everything, or to deprive himself of everything which can serve for the easing of weakness.

One should make use of food daily to the extent that the body, fortified, may be the friend and assistant of the soul in the practice of virtue. Otherwise, the soul may weaken because it is exhausted.

On Wednesdays and Fridays, especially during the four fasts, eat once a day, and the angel of the Lord will remain with you.”

– St. Seraphim

How passions are exterminated

“The passions are exterminated by sorrow and suffering, either voluntary or sent by Providence.” – St. Seraphim of Sarov

Feeling Coldness

“God is fire that warms and kindles the heart and inward parts. And so, if we feel in our hearts coldness, which is from the devil — for the devil is cold — then let us call upon the Lord and He will come and warm our hearts with perfect love not only for Him but for our neighbor as well.” – Saint Seraphim of Sarov

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