It’s supposed to be hard. That’s the first thing to understand. Fasting is medicine, and medicine doesn’t always taste good going down.
But here’s what matters more: the Church isn’t asking you to be a desert monk on day one. If you’ve got diabetes, if you’re nursing a baby, if you work twelve-hour shifts at the refinery and can’t pack a lunchbox full of hummus and olives, the Church has always known what to do with that. We call it economia. It’s pastoral discretion, and it’s been around since the beginning.
The fasting rules you see in the calendar represent the full practice. Think of them as the complete prescription. Then your priest works with you to figure out what you can actually do right now, given your life, your health, your stage in the faith. Two people standing next to each other at Liturgy might be fasting differently, and that’s fine. This isn’t about comparing scorecards.
Fasting isn’t a hoop you jump through to prove you’re Orthodox enough. It’s a tool for healing. The Church hands you this tool and says, “Here, this will help quiet your soul so you can hear God better.” If you’re too sick or too new or too overwhelmed to use the full tool right now, you use what you can. You don’t throw the whole thing away just because you can’t do it perfectly.
Let’s be practical. If you’re brand new to Orthodoxy and you’ve spent forty years eating whatever you wanted whenever you wanted, jumping straight into a full Lenten fast might just make you miserable and resentful. That’s not healing. That’s harm. Start smaller. Maybe you fast on Wednesdays and Fridays first. Maybe you just cut out meat to begin with. Talk to your priest. He’s not going to shame you. He’s going to meet you where you are.
Medical issues are real, and the Church has never pretended otherwise. If you’re recovering from surgery, if you’ve got a condition that requires specific nutrition, if you’re elderly and frail, those aren’t excuses. They’re realities. The saints fasted because they could, not because they were trying to win a contest. St. Seraphim of Sarov ate almost nothing, but he also told people to be sensible and not destroy their health out of false piety.
Work schedules matter too. I know people around here work offshore, two weeks on and two weeks off, eating whatever the galley serves. I know people who drive trucks cross-country and can’t exactly whip up a vegan feast at a Love’s Travel Stop in Louisiana at 2 a.m. The Church gets it. You do what you can. You make the effort. God sees the effort.
Here’s where it gets important: fasting without prayer is just a diet. If you’re white-knuckling your way through Lent, obsessing over ingredient labels, feeling superior because you didn’t eat cheese, you’ve missed the point entirely. That’s legalism, and it’s poison. The Pharisees were great at rules. They were terrible at love. Fasting should make you gentler, more aware of people who are hungry for real, more conscious of your own neediness before God. If it’s making you cranky and judgmental, something’s gone wrong.
The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is cooperation with God’s grace. We call that synergy. You’re not earning anything by fasting. You’re opening yourself up, making space, quieting the noise. Salvation isn’t a transaction where you trade forty days of no meat for a ticket to heaven. It’s a relationship, a healing, a long slow process of becoming more human, more like what God intended you to be.
And some days you’re going to fail. You’ll forget and eat a cookie with butter in it. You’ll get invited to your Baptist mother-in-law’s house and she’ll serve pot roast and you’ll have to decide whether to explain Orthodoxy for the fifteenth time or just eat the pot roast. You’ll get weak and tired and think this whole thing is impossible. That’s when you go to Confession, not because you’ve committed some unforgivable sin, but because you need help getting back up.
Start where you are. Talk to your priest before you try to be a hero. Pair whatever fasting you do with prayer and almsgiving. If you can’t fast from food much right now, fast from something else, social media, complaining, that third cup of coffee. The point is learning to say no to yourself in small ways so that you can say yes to God in bigger ones.
This is a long road. You’ve got the rest of your life to grow into it.
