The first
question which presents itself during the Lenten season is one of cuisine: “What on earth can I eat since the Church
forbids eating meat, fish, and dairy?”
It is a reasonable question, but must not be allowed to skew one’s
understanding of what Lenten fasting is all about or give the impression that
Lent is primarily about food.
For one
thing, the Church does not have any food laws in the same way that Judaism,
Islam, or Hinduism have food laws.
Religions often have food laws, but Christianity is not a religion. Rather it is our participation in this age of
the powers of the age to come, and as such it transcends religion with all its
categories, including the category of unclean food. Religions have such a category, and both
Judaism and Islam forbid the eating of pork.
Hinduism (at least as practised by some) famously forbids eating cows,
and some of its literature declares that no one who eats meat can have any
knowledge of God. These are true food
laws, and no one can obtain a dispensation from them to eat pork any more than
they could obtain a dispensation from the law of gravity. They are not “food guidelines”, but “food
laws”. Unclean food remains unclean, no
matter what.
Christianity
knows nothing of this. St. Paul declared
that “nothing is unclean in itself” (Romans 14:14), and that “nothing is to be
rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for then it is sanctified by the
Word of God and prayer”. To deny this in
the Church, he says, is one of the “doctrines of demons” (1 Timothy
4:1-5). Our fasting rules are not food
laws.
What then
is the point of them? The rules and
abstinence have less to do with the stomach and more to do with the heart. God originally made us as spirit, soul, and
body, with these three hierarchically ordered:
our bodies submitted to our souls and our souls submitted to the
spirit. Now everything is topsy-turvy
and inverted: our bodily appetites rule
over us, with our souls and personalities following obediently these bodily
desires. The spiritual life comes a
distant third. Fasting is meant to
overturn all this, and restore us to proper balance. By fasting from good things such as meat,
fish, dairy, and wine, we train our appetites to submit. Have you ever seen a dog with a treat
balanced on its nose? The dog longs for
the treat, but has been trained by its master not to eat the treat until
allowed. Lent disciplines us to imitate
the obedience of the well-trained dog, and not to eat the treat of more
luxurious cuisine until allowed at Pascha.
Lent says to our imperious desires, “You’re not the boss of me—the Lord
is”, and demands that it submit to the spiritual life.
The
fasting rules fulfill another function—that of binding us together as one
family. If simple ascetic abstinence
were the sole function of Lent, then rules would not be necessary. Each person could decide for himself “what to
give up for Lent” and proceed with his own individual programme of disciplining
the desires. But Christianity is not a
philosophy but a family. Nothing in it
is individual and isolated. We do not
baptize ourselves when we become Christians, but receive baptism at the hands
of another. We do not take bread and
wine at home alone, but come to the Eucharistic assembly along with our fellows
to receive it from the priest. The New
Testament epistles were mostly not written to individuals, but to churches, and
the prayer the Lord taught us was not the “My Father”, but the “Our
Father”. Christianity is relentlessly
corporate, and it binds us together as a single body, a united family. That is why the Church gives a single set of
rules for everyone to follow. If one
gave up meat, while another gave up chocolate and a third gave up coffee, all
might benefit from their asceticism, but corporate meals would become
impossible. So the Church bids us become
one, and to eat together, sharing not only the same Eucharistic Chalice, but
also the same fellowship table. The food
on that table must be allowed by everyone who approaches it—hence the single
set of fasting rules for all.
Finally,
the most important thing about the Lenten fasting cuisine is that it helps
soften our heart and promote love. An
old book once proclaimed, “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche”, and a wise woman I know
once built on that and further proclaimed, “Real Christians Don’t Eat Each
Other”. It is tempting to be
cannibalistic. As St. Paul once warned his
Galatian converts, “If you bite and devour one another, take care that you are
not consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:15).
It is too easy to speak words which wound, and to destroy another by
gossip, criticism, and insult. As
Solomon once taught, life and death are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs
18:21), and we often use that power for death and not for life. St. James warned us that the tongue is a
restless evil, full of deadly poison.
Man stands at the top of the food chain, and has tamed every other
species—lions, and tigers and bears. But
oh my!—no one can tame the tongue. If
one has tamed the tongue, one has arrived, and is mature and perfect man (James
3:1-12).
Lent bids
us tame the tongue and to love silence.
Some people when they arise in the morning turn on the computer or the
television or the radio, and leave it on all day. Most of us do the same with the tongue—when
we rise, we turn on the tongue, and leave it on. Lent bids us turn off the tongue, and only
turn it on when we need to use it—and then turn it off again. It’s hard work, just as fasting is hard
work. But only by doing this can we
achieve spiritual maturity.
Lenten
cuisine is ultimately not about food, like an Orthodox version of Jenny
Craig. It is about spiritual maturity,
and drawing near to Christ and to each other.
It will be over soon enough, as Pascha draws ever closer. All the more reason to use it while we have
the chance.
Source: http://frlawrencefarley.blogspot.com.by/2015/03/lenten-cuisine.html
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