Asceticism

Speaking of marriage...Here's a sermon by the late abbot of Simona Petras monastery, Archimandrite Aemilianos. Beautiful and full of common sense. Though he doesn't use the language of "hierarchy", everything he says on the mystical nature of marriage, and on the role of the spouses in making that mystery under Grace, sums up what I so briefly touched on in my last post.

Second, marriage is a journey of love. It is the creation of a new human being, a new person, for, as the Gospel says, "the two will be as one flesh" (Mt 19.5; Mk 10.7). God unites two people, and makes them one. From this union of two people, who agree to synchronize their footsteps and harmonize the beating of their hearts, a new human being emerges. Through such profound and spontaneous love, the one becomes a presence, a living reality, in the heart of the other. "I am married" means that I cannot live a single day, even a few moments, without the companion of my life. My husband, my wife, is a part of my being, of my flesh, of my soul. He or she complements me. He or she is the thought of my mind. He or she is the reason for which my heart beats.

I've just read a really good article by David Fagerberg of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. It appears in the latest edition of Logos (which is a journal anyone interested in this blog should find a way to read, preferably by subscribing!), under the title "Liturgical Fasting."

He reminds us in particular of some important points. First, "liturgy" is not the 55 minutes most of us spend in Church on Sunday. It is what being baptized means: "to swim is a verb, a swimmer is the noun; liturgy is a verb, Christian is the noun." Everything a Christian does, then, is liturgy (except sin, of course, which is, in a sense, the refusal to do liturgy, a turning away from the proper work (energeia) of a Christian. Everything a Christian does includes asceticism. And among the most important movements of the ascetic impulse is fasting. 

Fagerberg makes two points that especially struck me concerning this discipline. The first is that we should be careful not to think that when the Church disciplines us she is somehow speaking at a lower level than when she teaches or sanctifies us. Christ is prophet and priest, certainly, but he is also king. What makes a Christian is that he or she submits to divine rule, the only true way to freedom. Fasting, indeed all asceticism, is the working out of that submission on the physical and psychological level.

The second thing is that asceticism is not ultimately driven by either utilitarian or moralistic motives. Christians don't fast, for example, out of a desire to improve their physical health or support environmental causes. Nor do they give up food or drink because it is evil--that is why feasting is no less important than fasting! Now, these secondary motivations for fasting are not bad, in fact they can be tremendous benefits. But ultimately, fasting and asceticism is about sacrifice of self, that is about becoming one with the divine Word who speaks nothing of himself, but only what the Father bids him speak. So too our bodies need to speak the Word of the Father, for "man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."

All of this has tremendous ecumenical resonance. In the Orthodox Church the discipline of fasting, at least in theory, is still seen as a common work for all the faithful, especially the eucharistic fast and the fast of Great Lent. This reveals an understanding of the ascetical heart of liturgical life. Fasting in Latin West, on the other hand, has undergone a very different development, increasingly seen as an individual "life-style choice." Asceticism comes in a long way behind morality and vocation in western spiritual priorities, which is to say it lags behind moralism and utilitarianism.

So different have the too attitudes become on the popular level (thankfully not at the official level), that I have begun to wonder whether fasting may actually be a Church-dividing issue....