Holy Week Reading

We conclude our Lenten fast with a return to the simple question, “Why?” Why do we fast? What’s it all about? Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983) was a Russian Orthodox priest and theologian, most known for his liturgical theology. This reading excerpt comes from his book Great Lent: Journey to Pascha, in which he describes the Christian practice of fasting throughout Lent as a preparation for Easter. In this chapter, he describes the “why” of fasting — he discusses Jesus’s fasting in the desert and ultimately concludes that fasting is the means by which we become hungry for God.
 

There is no Lent without fasting. It seems, however, that many people today either do not take fasting seriously or, if they do, misunderstand its real spiritual goals. For some people, fasting consists in a symbolic “giving up” of something; for some others, it is a scrupulous observance of dietary regulations. But in both cases, seldom is fasting referred to the total Lenten effort. Here as elsewhere, therefore, we must first try to understand the Church’s teaching about fasting and then ask ourselves: how can we apply this teaching to our life?

Fasting or abstinence from food is not exclusively a Christian practice. It existed and still exists in other religious and even outside religion, as for example in some specific therapies. Today people fast (or abstain) for all kinds of reasons, including sometimes political reasons. It is important, therefore, to discern the uniquely Christian content of fasting. It is first of all revealed to us in the interdependence between two events which we find in the Bible: one at the beginning of the Old Testament and the other at the beginning of the New Testament. The first event is the “breaking of the fast” by Adam in Paradise. He ate of the forbidden fruit. This is how man’s original sin is revealed to us. Christ, the New Adam—and this is the second event—begins. By fasting. Adam was tempted and he succumbed to temptation; Christ was tempted and He overcame that temptation. The results of Adam’s failure are expulsion from Paradise and death. The fruits of Christ’s victory are the destruction of death and our return to Paradise. . . . 

Christ is the New Adam. He comes to repair the damage inflicted on life by Adam, to restore man to true life, and thus He also begins with fasting. “When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, He became hungry” (Matt. 4:2). Hunger is that state in which we realize our dependence on something else—when we urgently and essentially need food—showing thus that we have no life in ourselves. It is that limit beyond which I either die from starvation or, having satisfied my body, have again the impression of being alive. It is, in other words, the time when we face the ultimate question: on what does my life depend? And, since the question is not an academic one but is felt with my entire body, it is also the time of temptation. Satan came to Adam in Paradise; he came to Christ in the desert. He came to two hungry men and said: eat, for your hunger is the proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is in food. And Adam believed and ate; but Christ rejected the temptation and said: man shall not live by bread alone but by God. He refused to accept that cosmic lie which Satan imposed on the world, making that lie a self-evident truth not even debated any more, the foundation of our entire world view, of science, medicine, and perhaps even of religion. By doing this, Christ restored that relationship between food, life, and God which Adam broke, and which we still break every day.

What then is fasting for us Christians? It is our entrance and participation in that experience of Christ Himself by which He liberates us from the total dependence on food, matter, and the world. By no means in our liberation a full one. Living still in the fallen world, in the world of the Old Adam, being part of it, we still depend on food. But just as our death—through which we still must pass—has become by virtue of Christ’s Death a passage into life, the food we eat and the life it sustains can be life in God and for God. Part of our food has already become “food of immortality”—the Body and Blood of Christ Himself. But even the daily bread we receive from God can be in this life and in this world that which strengthens us, our communion with God, rather than that which separates us from God. Yet it is only fasting that can perform that transformation, giving us the existential proof that our dependence on food and matter is not total, not absolute, that united to prayer, grace, and adoration, it can itself be spiritual.

All this means that deeply understood, fasting is the only means by which man recovers his true spiritual nature. . . . Ultimately, to fast means only one thing: to be hungry—to go to the limit of that human condition which depends entirely on food and, being hungry, to discover that this dependence is not the whole truth about man, that hunger itself is first of all a spiritual state and that it is in its last reality hunger for God.
 

Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent: Journey to Pascha. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. 93–97. 
 

Alexander Schmemann writes with rich, theological language about the spiritual and liturgical dimensions of fasting. What ideas jumped out to you while reading his thoughts?

Schmemann compares Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit to Christ’s fasting in the desert, connecting Christ’s fast to our own discipline of fasting. What other connections do you see between Adam, Christ, and yourself?

Ultimately, he concludes that fasting is the way in which we are transformed into God’s image, and that to fast is to participate in the process of becoming hungry for God. As we approach the overwhelming Paschal joy of Easter, do you feel hungry for God? How can you continue to cultivate this hunger, even after your Lenten fast has ended?