FASTING

Well, today is 'Clean Monday', the first day of the Orthodox Lent, and the beginning of the great fast always poses something of a problem for me. When I became Orthodox, I was surprised and a little shocked at the extent and severity of fasting in the Orthodox Church. As a fairly wishy-washy Anglican, fasting to me had involved not eating meat on Good Friday, perhaps giving up chocolate for Lent (a shorter period anyway in the Anglican Church) and on one occasion not smoking for the whole of Ash Wednesday: what incredible self sacrifice, the age of asceticism was not dead! Well, how was I to approach the rigours of Orthodoxy?

I have no problem with the idea of fasting which can be justified for a number of reasons. I have discussed in an earlier blog the lack of opportunity to test the strength of one’s faith in modern Europe. This has, of course, occurred in previous eras and the Orthodox Church has always acknowledged that asceticism is a form of martyrdom, represented on icons by the ascetics often holding a martyr’s cross: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” Secondly, fasting makes us conscious of our dependence on God. Metropolitan Kallistos writes, “If practised seriously, the Lenten abstinence from food … involves a considerable amount of real hunger and also a feeling of tiredness and physical exhaustion. The purpose of this is to lead us in turn to a sense of inward brokenness and contrition; to bring us, that is, to the point where we appreciate the full force of Christ’s statement, ‘Without Me you can do nothing’ (John 15;5).” Finally, at least a few times a year, one can feel some affinity with the vast numbers of people who are literally starving. Fasting is not a choice for the people of Dafur!

MARTYRS – A FEW MORE THOUGHTS

Metropolitan Benjamin

I ended my last posting with the conclusion that I'm probably not the stuff of which martyrs are made. However, I also made the point that nobody can be sure of how they will react in any given circumstances. Most of my examples were drawn from the early persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire but, bringing things up to date, I find the story of Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd at the time of the Russian revolution, particularly poignant. As the turmoil of the revolution was beginning, he welcomed the opportunity to bear witness to the Gospel in a more meaningful way than had been possible in the relatively comfortable life of a bishop in pre-revolutionary Russia. “In my childhood and adolescence,” he wrote, “I immersed myself in reading the lives of the saints, and was enraptured by their heroism and their holy inspiration. With all my heart I sorrowed over the fact that times had changed and one no longer had to suffer what they suffered. Times have changed again, and the opportunity has been opened to suffer for Christ both from one's own people and from strangers!” For his resolute opposition to the excesses and injustices of the early days of the revolution, he was shot in 1922.

Another point worth making about martyrdom is that it is a willingness to give one's life for a cause and does not involve taking life. I find it extremely sad that, in recent years, ‘martyrdom’ has become almost a dirty word, associated with killing oneself and innocent bystanders as a political act of terror rather than the voluntary sacrifice of one’s own life to bear witness to one’s faith. As Gandhi said: “For this cause (abolition of South Africa's pass laws) I too would be prepared to die but there is no cause for which I would kill.” The recently canonized Orthodox saint Alexander Schmorell, even while fighting the horrors of the Nazi regime, vowed never to kill ‘either Russian or German.’