Lenten Fasting

As we are about to begin Lent we have, hopefully, thought about our observance and discipline for the coming weeks and we have doubtless make those choices as to what “to give up for Lent.”

I am now of an age when I am no longer required by the Church to fast or abstain, but I do nevertheless seek to observe a tolerably rigorous discipline. The problem is that having made my mental list of what to give up in terms of food and drink I realise that I am, in fact, ‘giving up’ things that I rarely consume …. Which is not, however, to say that my grocery shopping will not have to be adjusted to accommodate the temporary regime. Nor must one forget what one can still eat and drink on Saturday evenings after Vespers and on Sundays, as being a day exempt from the fast, or any major feasts or solemnities that occur ….

By contrast life in the past was much more strict, and also much more structured, as it still is for the Orthodox. It was not a case of what I am going to give up, but rather, what am I permitted to eat today?

Changing dietary habits also affect these matters. Fasting on one main meal and two small snacks might have been for many, if not all, quite a hardship a century ago with colder houses, fewer cars and more manual labour, as well as very different working patterns. Today eating more than one main meal and two light snacks any day is liable to bring down upon one the wrath of the healthy eating lobby. Cutting out meat is less challenging when vegetarian and vegan ideas hold so much sway.

Indeed the age dispensation at 60 is in modern conditions of rising life expectancy and better health probably in need of an increase like the pensionable age - “70 is the new 60” and such like.

G.K.Chesterton - and that is someone who could have fasted with profit to both his girth and his health no doubt - famously opined   

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

  

Maybe that can be varied to

The Christian ideal of fasting has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

My thoughts on these ideas, with various online links, from 2016 can be read at Traditional Rule of Fasting and Abstinence

My reflections from two years ago, again including various links to relevant websites, also seem worth sharing again and can be seen at Fasting and Abstinence in Lent

I have posted in past years about exemptions to fasting being purchased by the late medieval population of the archdioceses of Rouen and Bourges and the diversion of funds to spectacular building projects in those two great cathedrals. These and related themes are set out in 2015 in The Tour de Beurre and in 2021 in Medieval Lenten and Easter cookery

Despite citing these medieval precedents it is I think fair to say that Lent is a discipline which has been hollowed out both officially by the Church and unofficially by the congregation certainly over time, but most notably in the last sixty to seventy years. We seem very far removed from Evelyn Waugh going to stay with Ian Fleming in the 1950s and arriving with a set of scales to weigh his reduced portions for Lent.

This is not therefore to say we should ignore fasting and abstinence - far from it. We need to rediscover its history and intention.

Peter Kwasniewski recently had an article on the New Liturgical Movement website about the discipline and history of fasting in the life of the Church, and especially in respect of Lenten observance. As with all his articles it is well researched and worth reading. It can be seen at In the Approach to Lent: Fasting Matters

A Holy, happy, spiritually reinvigorating and abstemious Lenten Fast to all my readers.