Orthodox laypeople normally fast two days a week: Wednesday and Friday. At the monasteries, you'll find Mondays thrown in there too, and of course we all fast before communion, but that's not an all-day thing. There's also Lent, Holy Week, the Apostles' Fast, the Dormition fast, the Nativity fast (the forty days before Christmas), and a few other fast days thrown in for fun, which, when tallied up, amount to fasting for about half the year.
But you'll also find a very broad range of compliance with those rules, a wide range of full and partial exceptions and exemptions. The strictest set of rules says fast days should mean a fully vegan diet (excepting shellfish: if it hasn't got a backbone, it's not an animal for fasting purposes, so fish are forbidden, but shrimp are OK. Technically. So are locusts and honey.) with no wine or oil. And for a handful of very strict fast days, such as Great and Holy Friday, best practice is to eat nothing at all. We have a wall-calendar to keep it straight for us ;) There are a lot of people who can't or shouldn't do that, so there are automatic exemptions for young children, women who are pregnant or nursing, the elderly, and people who are ill. There are also a lot of people who have strenuous jobs and need to maintain physical condition all the time, people who have dietary restrictions that make fasting a terrific hardship, etc. and these people normally would talk to their priest and get a dispensation to follow less-strict rules. People with a history of eating disorders are often forbidden to fast. It's not much applicable in the modern industrial world, but traditionally, very poor people were not required to fast: if you have a hard time getting enough food for your family, you're counted as fasting already. The standard advice for converts is: don't try to do it all at once! Ease into it.
Out in messy reality, not all of us are in a position to manage it, and we follow as best we can with the hope that we'll someday reach a stage of life, or a stage of self-discipline, that will make it possible for us. A lot of us go with a more lenient ovo-lacto-vegetarian thing on fast days. It's not following the rules, but when you have little kids *and* special diets to work around, you start feeling like a short order cook in your own kitchen, making separate meals for everyone. It just doesn't work. We focus our efforts more on the prayer, alms, and media fasting side of things, but hopefully we can change that when the kids are older.
But from personal experience, even with my paltry attempts at keeping the fasts... abstaining from food does have the effect of strengthening the will and arresting the slide down into wallowing in fleshly sin etc., but also induces an altered state of consciousness which, with prayer, puts you in closer contact with the non-material planes.
It is funny about the partying though. I was raised in a very straitlaced Calvinist church, and my first Orthodox Pascha was revelatory. Took me a few days to really process that I had hung out at church until 4am, seen the priest taking a shot of vodka with a group of young men who were by that time wearing their ties as headbands, and that the announcements that night had included who to talk to if you needed to crash on someone's couch before driving home-- and this all seemed totally normal to everyone there. I have since confirmed with other sources: Arabs know how to party.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: another keeper!
Date: 2021-09-15 02:30 am (UTC)But you'll also find a very broad range of compliance with those rules, a wide range of full and partial exceptions and exemptions. The strictest set of rules says fast days should mean a fully vegan diet (excepting shellfish: if it hasn't got a backbone, it's not an animal for fasting purposes, so fish are forbidden, but shrimp are OK. Technically. So are locusts and honey.) with no wine or oil. And for a handful of very strict fast days, such as Great and Holy Friday, best practice is to eat nothing at all. We have a wall-calendar to keep it straight for us ;) There are a lot of people who can't or shouldn't do that, so there are automatic exemptions for young children, women who are pregnant or nursing, the elderly, and people who are ill. There are also a lot of people who have strenuous jobs and need to maintain physical condition all the time, people who have dietary restrictions that make fasting a terrific hardship, etc. and these people normally would talk to their priest and get a dispensation to follow less-strict rules. People with a history of eating disorders are often forbidden to fast. It's not much applicable in the modern industrial world, but traditionally, very poor people were not required to fast: if you have a hard time getting enough food for your family, you're counted as fasting already. The standard advice for converts is: don't try to do it all at once! Ease into it.
Out in messy reality, not all of us are in a position to manage it, and we follow as best we can with the hope that we'll someday reach a stage of life, or a stage of self-discipline, that will make it possible for us. A lot of us go with a more lenient ovo-lacto-vegetarian thing on fast days. It's not following the rules, but when you have little kids *and* special diets to work around, you start feeling like a short order cook in your own kitchen, making separate meals for everyone. It just doesn't work. We focus our efforts more on the prayer, alms, and media fasting side of things, but hopefully we can change that when the kids are older.
But from personal experience, even with my paltry attempts at keeping the fasts... abstaining from food does have the effect of strengthening the will and arresting the slide down into wallowing in fleshly sin etc., but also induces an altered state of consciousness which, with prayer, puts you in closer contact with the non-material planes.
It is funny about the partying though. I was raised in a very straitlaced Calvinist church, and my first Orthodox Pascha was revelatory. Took me a few days to really process that I had hung out at church until 4am, seen the priest taking a shot of vodka with a group of young men who were by that time wearing their ties as headbands, and that the announcements that night had included who to talk to if you needed to crash on someone's couch before driving home-- and this all seemed totally normal to everyone there. I have since confirmed with other sources: Arabs know how to party.