This is what the fasting tradition is all about, actually. Taming epithymia. It was part of the talk I linked in the other comment thread. We have lots of fasts. The short one where you fast before receiving communion-- no breakfast before liturgy. There are the regular Wednesday and Friday fasts, an assortment of individual days of remembrance like the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, and then the longer ones for the dormition, the apostles, the nativity, and of course lent. But of course they are followed by feasts. So we are not saying "I will never eat again" or "I am giving up meat forever" or anything, we are saying to the appetite: wait. It'll be OK. Wait a few hours, we'll eat after liturgy. Wait until tomorrow: today is a fast day. And those are little exercises that get us ready to go for the big kahuna, right? Not today. Not today. Not today. Not today... x40. Save it for Pascha-- then we'll have a right good time! (the perhaps funniest part of Pascha is that you get there, and you have a basket full of cheese and sausage and butter and sweets and you can hardly eat any of it it's so rich). Day in, day out, we are taming the epithymia, yeah?
I think this is one thing Catholicism has lost over time-- they used to have year-round regular fasts too, and they seem to have pared it down to just a wee shadow of itself, like fish on fridays *during lent* (instead of no meat for forty days, and no meat ever on Fridays all year). I don't really know how or why that happened.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-09-27 09:17 pm (UTC)I think this is one thing Catholicism has lost over time-- they used to have year-round regular fasts too, and they seem to have pared it down to just a wee shadow of itself, like fish on fridays *during lent* (instead of no meat for forty days, and no meat ever on Fridays all year). I don't really know how or why that happened.