By Dionysios Karagiannis
The period of fasting, repentance and praying is called Great Lent, a period of great asceticism, a call and a prompting, as the hymnographer says, “the stadium of virtues comes to light, and you may enter to train.”
There are many subjects and many reminders of ascetical and neptic theology about fasting and its benefits.
Theodore the Studite (Catechesis 33) describes the Lent as a harbor without storms, in which all people travel and enjoy a spiritual serenity.
Lent is not only a saving period for monks and clerics but also for all believers of all ages. Salvation belongs to each one. Each one gets its own separate part though its own personal struggle in that period.
Then, our Saint says that the teaching of the Church and the reminder of the clerics and monks in the Lent are promptings and instructions for each one, just as those who struggle at the stadium need the vocal support from those co-fasting, and more just as the sculptors need their teachers’ remarks. Likewise, the clerics encourage the production of goods.
Fasting has to be welcomed with joy and simplicity, without sorrow for the deprivation of certain foods.
While there may be an enthusiasm, an emotional and psychological qualification, which can be painless and acceptable, as it seems to many believers and clerics, the Saint points out that fasting is not only physical but also spiritual.
Great Lent does not only mean abstinence from certain foods, but also every abstinence from evil. Some believers are trying to follow the strictest fast, in a selfish imitation of ascetics’ fast, fail in advance to achieve both its benefits and good fruits, when this effort relies on despair, inertia, jealousy, disputes, which, like the serpent, are hidden in our inner self.
Lent is in the springtime, when everything is blooming, when the fruits are growing on trees, and the farmers are sowing them.
However, thorns are growing in these fields and need to be cut.
Thus, Saint Theodore the Studite (Catechism 31) says that in the springtime our body wants and demands enough food, and we must be careful to give it the necessary quantity, because this is the source of passions and sins.
With fasting, our body expels the tendency to sin and continues its catharsis.
Besides, the Saint tells us that these fruits and the benefits of fasting are also for saving it.
Christians’ homeland is Jerusalem and their purpose is to gain the Kingdom of God. The fruits of fasting give to the Christians supplies and goods to be able to become citizens of the Kingdom of God.
This saving coming from the fasting period is for those things God has prepared for His kingdom, that is for things and goods that nobody saw and heard, and no one ever thought.
We have to cleanse ourselves so that we can be cleansed in the blissful life, that is to be ready to be the vessels of the grace of God. Amen.
