Categories: uncategorized
Date: 14 November 2005 22:32:49
The Nativity Fast begins today. This page gives an overview of fasting, and this article explains the Nativity Fast in a bit more detail.
While I have attempted to follow the follow the Wednesday and Friday weekly fasts, this will be the first time I'm attempting a 'seasonal fast'. Fasting is largely about obedience and humility, and one always conducts fasting under the guidance of one's spiritual father. Choosing to be more rigorous without one's spiritual father's advice and approval is frowned upon, at least as far as I'm aware.
And fasting is not just depriving oneself of food. One is expected to have a complete change of focus, looking less to ourselves and more to God and to those around us. As the words of a hymn sung on the Vespers of the first da of Lent make clear:
Let us observe a fast acceptable and pleasing to the Lord. True fasting is to put away all evil, to control the tongue, to forbear from anger, to abstain from lust, slander, falsehood and perjury. If we renounce these things, then is our fasting true and acceptable.