My beloved spiritual children in Christ Our Only True God and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST! HE WAS, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE.
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THE INNER SIGNIFICANCE OF FASTING
The inner significance of fasting is best summed up in the triad: prayer, fasting, almsgiving. Divorced from prayer and from the reception of the Holy Mysteries (Sacraments) unaccompanied by acts of compassion, our fasting becomes pharisaical or even demonic. It leads, not to contrition and joyfulness, but to pride, inward tension, and irritability. The link between prayer and fasting is rightly indicated by Father Alexander Elchaninov. A circle of fasting says to him: 'Our work suffers and we become irritable...I have never seen servants [in pre-revolutionary Russia] so bad-tempered as during the last days of Holy Week. Clearly, fasting has a very bad effect on the nerves.' To this Father Alexander replies: 'You are quite right...If it is not accompanied by prayer and an increased spiritual life, it merely leads to a heightened state of irritability. It is natural that servants who took their fasting seriously and who were forced to work hard during Lent, while not being allowed to go to church, were angry and irritable.
Fasting, then, is valueless or even harmful when not combined with prayer. In the Gospels the devil is cast out, not by fasting alone, but "prayer and fasting" (St. Matthew 17:21; St. Mark 9:29); and of the early Christians it is said, not simply that they fasted, but that they "fasted and prayed" (Acts 13:3; compare 14:23). In both the Old and New Testament fasting is seen, not as an end in itself, but as an aid to more intense and living prayer, as a preparation for decisive action or for direct encounter with God. Thus our Lord's forty-day fast in the wilderness was the immediate preparation for His Public Ministry (St. Matthew 4:1-11). When Moses fasted on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:28) and Elijah on Mount Horeb (3[I]Kgs. 19:8-12), the fast was in both cases linked with a theophany. The same connection between fasting and the vision of god is evident in the case of Saint Peter (Acts 10:9-17). He "went up on the housetop to pray about the sixth hour, and he became very hungry and wanted to eat"; and it was in this state that he fell into a trance and heard the Divine voice. Such is always the purpose of ascetic fasting - to enable us, as the Triodion puts it, to 'draw near to the mountain of prayer'.
Prayer and fasting should in their turn be accompanied by almsgiving (philanthropy) - by love for others expressed in practical form, by works of compassion and forgiveness. Eight (8) days before the opening of the Lenten fast, on the Sunday of the Last Judgment, the appointed Gospel is the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (St. Matthew 25:31-46), reminding us that the criterion in the coming judgment will not be the strictness of our fasting but the amount of help that we have given to those in need. In the words of the Triodion:
"Knowing the Commandments of the Lord, let this be our way of life: Let us feed the hungry, let us give the thirsty drink, Let us clothe the naked, let us, welcome strangers, Let us visit those in prison and the sick. Then the Judge of all the earth will say even to us: 'Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you". (Source: Lenten Triodion)
(To be continued)
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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!" - Saint John Chrysostomos
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With sincere agape in His Holy Diakonia (Ministry),
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+Father George