I may not thirst
The purpose of fasting and how Lent lays us bare
It was my first Holy Saturday, as an Orthodox Christian, and I had gone with friends to the monastery an hour away for the morning service. As is the custom of Orthodox people in preparation for receiving the Eucharist, I had been fasting from food and water since the evening before. I was hungry and thirsty, tired from waking up early, and in pain due to an old hip injury inflamed by the long drive.
We parked in the grassy lot and made our way to the outdoor chapel. The path was quiet. Rabbits watched us a few feet away. Birds flitted from branch to branch. There was something of Tolkien’s Shire to the place with its vegetable gardens, its happy chickens, and its grass rooftops.
The chapel consisted of a mostly-open, wood-frame sanctuary. Trees made up the walls of the nave, and wooden benches served as rows of seating. We took our places and settled in for the two-hour service. Even in the beauty of the day and my surroundings, in the holiness of the liturgy, I couldn’t forget my body—my hunger, thirst, and agitation.
As a child, I wondered about the point of fasting. Since I wasn’t raised Orthodox, my exposure to it was minimal and limited to the practice of the individual churchgoer. When I would ask why people fasted, the answer was usually, it’s in the scriptures, and God wants us to do it. For some, it was a diet with Bible-reading. As far as I could tell, it meant going hungry, and eight-year-old me had no interest in that.
Four years makes quite a difference. From the ages of twelve into my early twenties, I was on and off diets, and my disordered relationship with food took up most of my headspace. All my life, I’d watched women close to me loathe and punish their bodies in an effort to control them, so when I reached that tender, vulnerable age where everything about me seemed awful, I fought to control mine. Put it through so much. Hated it.
The final stroke of cruelty to myself was weight loss surgery, an expensive procedure which prevented me from eating more than a few ounces in one sitting. The result was fourteen years of misery. It only took the first year to make me see how broken my relationships to food and my body were.
Something had to change. I decided to focus only on health and happiness. Never weight. To treat my body as a friend and believe it was good, regardless of what messages I received from outside. Some days were better than others. I even went on another diet or two. But I always came back to those renewed ways of living and thinking. Starving, punishing exercise, and fasting of any kind were joyously off the table.
Years later, when I began investigating the Orthodox church, I was concerned about the practices of fasting. Fearing a regression into disordered eating, I asked my pastor, given my circumstances, what I should do. His answer was a recommendation to speak with my doctor and to do whatever I could manage.
Traditionally, the Orthodox fasts are observed on most Wednesdays, Fridays, and before Christmas and Easter (called Pascha). Before Pascha, we have Lent, and Lent is the toughest of all. A mostly-vegan diet is prescribed for all the fasts, but Lent is the longest and the deepest. There are days during this holy time when even limiting noise and activity are recommended. I was—and still am—already a vegan, so I, with my doctor’s and pastor’s approval, decided to fast from sweets. I wanted to participate however I could, even if I still didn’t understand the act as anything other than an imitation of Christ’s forty days in the wilderness.
On Holy Saturday, at the monastery service, everyone seemed to be having an easier time than me. We stand for our services, but I had to sit. I was beginning to feel shaky, woozy, and I didn’t want to pass out. Looking back, I realize there wasn’t much danger of that, but I was so miserable in my body, so scared of the emptiness in my stomach and what it might take me back to that I wanted to curl up and cry. Instead, I sat hunched, hiding under my headscarf, asking myself questions. How long before it’s over? And why in the world am I doing this?
Answers are funny things. They come to us finally when we have carried the ring the whole long way to Mount Doom. That’s when the grace, the provision that has been made, takes place. But we must carry it until our strength gives out, until we hit the wall, find the edge of the cliff, empty ourselves so the answer has a place to live in us.
My first sensation, sitting there in my veil and my long dress with its long sleeves, was of being naked before God. Not naked like in a bad dream where you find yourself at school without any clothes. Naked in the way of Him seeing all of me and my being aware of His gaze.
I saw, too, that there was room now, space where before there had been none. Quiet where there had been clamor. I’d never thought of food as noise. I’d been using it to drown out all the sorrows I couldn’t sit with, to avoid closing my eyes. It had been a mask I’d worn before God. A distance I’d created. A barrier.
Time, hunger, thirst, discomfort were nothing to this understanding, this final answer to my childhood question which grafted itself onto me as though it had always been there.
Three years on, and I don’t keep the fasts perfectly. That’s not the point. The point, as the prophets, desert monastics, wild hermits, and ascetic saints have declared with their lives is not to show strength of will or to suffer, but to encounter the Divine. To pour out the ego and be filled with Living Water, which becomes “a fountain springing up into everlasting life.”1
I hope your Lent will be fruitful, however and whenever you are observing it. A life can be full of little lents if we have the courage, and each one, with its sorrows, trials, and mountainous climbs, an adventure into the waiting and fertile country of the Friendly Darkness.
John 4:14
Thank you for sharing about your experiences with fasting so openly. I'm Catholic and in recent years we've really relaxed our former fasting rules... (It used to be the case that we also had to fast from food and water starting the night before receiving the Eucharist. Now it's just an hour before). I've admired the Orthodox for keeping it up more, but as you beautifully reflected, it's definitely something that each individual should take into careful consideration. In my case, I feel like so much is left up for us to decide on our own with Lent that I struggle with feeling like I do Lent "properly."