{"id":717,"date":"2018-03-09T06:46:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T06:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.smallpage.online\/2018\/03\/09\/what-on-earth-can-i-eat-since-churc\/"},"modified":"2020-03-25T11:29:03","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T11:29:03","slug":"what-on-earth-can-i-eat-since-churc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/what-on-earth-can-i-eat-since-churc","title":{"rendered":"What on Earth Can I Eat Since the Church Forbids Eating Meat, Fish, and Dairy During Great Lent?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The first question which presents itself during the Lenten season is one of cuisine:\u00a0 \u201cWhat on earth can I eat since the Church forbids eating meat, fish, and dairy?\u201d\u00a0 It is a reasonable question, but must not be allowed to skew one\u2019s understanding of what Lenten fasting is all about or give the impression that Lent is primarily about food.<\/div>\n
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For one thing, the Church does not have any food laws in the same way that Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism have food laws. Religions often have food laws, but Christianity is not a religion.\u00a0 Rather it is our participation in this age of the powers of the age to come, and as such it transcends religion with all its categories, including the category of unclean food.\u00a0 Religions have such a category, and both Judaism and Islam forbid the eating of pork.\u00a0 Hinduism (at least as practised by some) famously forbids eating cows, and some of its literature declares that no one who eats meat can have any knowledge of God.\u00a0 These are true food laws, and no one can obtain a dispensation from them to eat pork any more than they could obtain a dispensation from the law of gravity.\u00a0 They are not \u201cfood guidelines\u201d, but \u201cfood laws\u201d.\u00a0 Unclean food remains unclean, no matter what.<\/div>\n
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Christianity knows nothing of this.\u00a0 St. Paul declared that \u201cnothing is unclean in itself\u201d (Romans 14:14), and that \u201cnothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for then it is sanctified by the Word of God and prayer\u201d.\u00a0 To deny this in the Church, he says, is one of the \u201cdoctrines of demons\u201d (1 Timothy 4:1-5).\u00a0 Our fasting rules are not food laws.<\/div>\n
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What then is the point of them?\u00a0 The rules and abstinence have less to do with the stomach and more to do with the heart.\u00a0 God originally made us as spirit, soul, and body, with these three hierarchically ordered:\u00a0 our bodies submitted to our souls and our souls submitted to the spirit.\u00a0 Now everything is topsy-turvy and inverted:\u00a0 our bodily appetites rule over us, with our souls and personalities following obediently these bodily desires.\u00a0 The spiritual life comes a distant third.\u00a0 Fasting is meant to overturn all this, and restore us to proper balance.\u00a0 By fasting from good things such as meat, fish, dairy, and wine, we train our appetites to submit.\u00a0 Have you ever seen a dog with a treat balanced on its nose?\u00a0 The dog longs for the treat, but has been trained by its master not to eat the treat until allowed.\u00a0 Lent disciplines us to imitate the obedience of the well-trained dog, and not to eat the treat of more luxurious cuisine until allowed at Pascha. Lent says to our imperious desires, \u201cYou\u2019re not the boss of me\u2014the Lord is\u201d, and demands that it submit to the spiritual life.<\/div>\n
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The fasting rules fulfill another function\u2014that of binding us together as one family.\u00a0 If simple ascetic abstinence were the sole function of Lent, then rules would not be necessary.\u00a0 Each person could decide for himself \u201cwhat to give up for Lent\u201d and proceed with his own individual programme of disciplining the desires. But Christianity is not a philosophy but a family.\u00a0 Nothing in it is individual and isolated.\u00a0 We do not baptize ourselves when we become Christians, but receive baptism at the hands of another. We do not take bread and wine at home alone, but come to the Eucharistic assembly along with our fellows to receive it from the priest.\u00a0 The New Testament epistles were mostly not written to individuals, but to churches, and the prayer the Lord taught us was not the \u201cMy Father\u201d, but the \u201cOur Father\u201d.\u00a0 Christianity is relentlessly corporate, and it binds us together as a single body, a united family.\u00a0 That is why the Church gives a single set of rules for everyone to follow.\u00a0 If one gave up meat, while another gave up chocolate and a third gave up coffee, all might benefit from their asceticism, but corporate meals would become impossible.\u00a0 So the Church bids us become one, and to eat together, sharing not only the same Eucharistic Chalice, but also the same fellowship table.\u00a0 The food on that table must be allowed by everyone who approaches it\u2014hence the single set of fasting rules for all.<\/div>\n
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Finally, the most important thing about the Lenten fasting cuisine is that it helps soften our heart and promote love. An old book once proclaimed, \u201cReal Men Don\u2019t Eat Quiche\u201d, and a wise woman I know once built on that and further proclaimed, \u201cReal Christians Don\u2019t Eat Each Other\u201d.\u00a0 It is tempting to be cannibalistic.\u00a0 As St. Paul once warned his Galatian converts, \u201cIf you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another\u201d (Galatians 5:15).\u00a0 It is too easy to speak words which wound, and to destroy another by gossip, criticism, and insult.\u00a0 As Solomon once taught, life and death are in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21), and we often use that power for death and not for life.\u00a0 St. James warned us that the tongue is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.\u00a0 Man stands at the top of the food chain, and has tamed every other species\u2014lions, and tigers and bears.\u00a0 But oh my!\u2014no one can tame the tongue.\u00a0 If one has tamed the tongue, one has arrived, and is mature and perfect man (James 3:1-12).<\/div>\n
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Lent bids us tame the tongue and to love silence.\u00a0 Some people when they arise in the morning turn on the computer or the television or the radio, and leave it on all day.\u00a0 Most of us do the same with the tongue\u2014when we rise, we turn on the tongue, and leave it on.\u00a0 Lent bids us turn off the tongue, and only turn it on when we need to use it\u2014and then turn it off again.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard work, just as fasting is hard work.\u00a0 But only by doing this can weachieve spiritual maturity.<\/div>\n
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Lenten cuisine is ultimately not about food, like an Orthodox version of Jenny Craig.\u00a0 It is about spiritual maturity, and drawing near to Christ and to each other.\u00a0 It will be over soon enough, as Pascha draws ever closer.\u00a0 All the more reason to use it while we have the chance.<\/div>\n
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Source:\u00a0https:\/\/frlawrencefarley.blogspot.com.by\/2015\/03\/lenten-cuisine.html<\/a><\/em><\/div>\n
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The first question which presents itself during the Lenten season is one of cuisine:\u00a0 \u201cWhat on earth can I eat since the Church forbids…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[56],"tags":[43,17],"class_list":["post-717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-life-issues","tag-great-lent","tag-lent-and-fasting"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/2-09-17-_a_-2.jpg","views":{"total":86,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1768423146},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paPyw9-bz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29220,"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions\/29220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catalog.obitel-minsk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}