“When ye fast”, not “if”
Christ assumes it. In the Sermon on the Mount He does not argue for fasting or against it; He takes it for granted and corrects the manner: “Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast” (Matthew 6:16, KJV). The instruction that follows is not to stop, but to hide it — “anoint thine head, and wash thy face” — so that the fast is seen by the Father and by nobody else.
Asked why His disciples did not fast while John’s did, He answered that the guests at a wedding do not mourn while the bridegroom is with them, “but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast” (Matthew 9:15, KJV). He fasted forty days Himself before His public ministry. The Church at Antioch was fasting and praying when it set apart Barnabas and Saul, and fasted and prayed again before sending them (Acts 13:2–3).
None of this settles any particular rule about food, and the apostolic writings do not give one. What they show is that fasting was assumed rather than invented later, and that the Church went on doing it after the Resurrection as a matter of course. The Orthodox Church has simply never stopped, and has spent the centuries since working out how the practice fits the ordinary year.
The rhythm of the week and the year
Two days a week carry the memory of Holy Week into every ordinary week: Wednesday, on which Christ was betrayed, and Friday, on which He was crucified. Outside a few fast-free weeks these are kept throughout the year, which means that for an Orthodox household the question of what is for dinner is settled twice a week by the calendar rather than by appetite.
Beyond that there are four fasting seasons, and one of the clearest statements of the rule in English was compiled by Fr. Seraphim Rose for the St Herman Calendar. He lists them as Great Lent, the Nativity Fast, the Apostles’ Fast and the Dormition Fast, together with two single days that are fasts even though they are feasts: the Exaltation of the Cross and the Beheading of the Forerunner, kept as such because of what they commemorate.
This parish, like the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church, keeps the older Julian reckoning, so the dates above fall thirteen days later on the ordinary civil calendar: the Dormition Fast runs from 14 to 27 August, and the Nativity Fast from 28 November to 6 January. Great Lent and the Apostles’ Fast move with Pascha and have no fixed dates at all.
Rather than work this out from first principles, use the parish’s own fasting page at https://orthodox.sg/fasting.html. It gives the rule for today, the degrees of fasting, the seasons, and — because this is Singapore — practical help with reading a hawker centre menu, where an innocent-looking vegetable dish may have been cooked with pork stock or shrimp paste. The page is a guide rather than a ruling; for a particular question, ask the parish clergy.
- Great Lent and Holy Week — seven weeks before Pascha, the longest and strictest of the four.
- The Apostles’ Fast — beginning on the Monday after the Sunday of All Saints and ending on the eve of Saints Peter and Paul; its length varies each year with the date of Pascha.
- The Dormition Fast — a fortnight, 1 to 14 August on the Church calendar, ending with the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God.
- The Nativity Fast — forty days, from 15 November on the Church calendar until the Nativity of Christ, with the last days stricter than the rest.
What is actually given up
The strictest days set aside meat, poultry, eggs, dairy, fish, wine and oil. Lighter days restore oil and wine; lighter still, fish as well. The pattern is not arbitrary: the rule lives in the Typicon, chiefly in its thirty-second and thirty-third chapters, and it is relaxed for feasts and vigils, so that the more a day is celebrated, the more consolation is allowed at table.
Two clarifications save a great deal of anxiety. Practice on some foods, shellfish among them, differs between Orthodox traditions and even between parishes, so it is a question for the clergy rather than one to settle from a book. And the standard is a standard, not a verdict. Writing about the rule he had compiled, Fr. Seraphim Rose said plainly that it is not meant to be a straitjacket, nor a source of pharisaical pride for anyone who keeps its letter; it is the measure against which each person judges his own practice and towards which he strives according to his strength and circumstances.
That last phrase — strength and circumstances — is doing real work, and it belongs to the rule itself rather than being a modern concession bolted on to soften it. The Typicon was written for monasteries and has always been applied to families in the world with judgment. A household with young children, shift work and a long commute is not keeping a lesser Christianity by fasting less than a monk; it is keeping the same rule in different circumstances.
Not a diet, and not a way of earning anything
This has to be said flatly, because it is the commonest misunderstanding and because saying it gently has not worked. Fasting does not earn God’s favour. It purchases nothing, offsets nothing and puts God under no obligation whatever. “But meat commendeth us not to God: for neither, if we eat, are we the better; neither, if we eat not, are we the worse” (1 Corinthians 8:8, KJV). Saint Paul is blunt, and the Church reads him at face value.
Neither is it a health regime. If someone loses weight during Great Lent that is incidental, and a fast kept for the figure has quietly become something else. The prophets were sharper still about fasts kept while the poor went hungry: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free” (Isaiah 58:6, KJV).
What fasting is for is smaller and harder. It is training. A person who cannot say no to cheese on a Wednesday has little practice at saying no to anger on a Thursday. The food is the exercise weight, not the point; and the kingdom of God, as Saint Paul says in the same breath, “is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17, KJV).
Why the body is involved at all
Orthodoxy does not divide a person into a soul that matters and a body that is along for the ride. The body prays: it stands through long services, bows, makes the sign of the cross, prostrates itself in Lent, and is buried in hope of rising. It is baptised, anointed and communed. A Christianity in which the body has nothing to do would be a different religion.
Fasting is the point at which this becomes concrete and slightly uncomfortable. It is also communal rather than private. Across Singapore and across the world the same households are eating the same plain food on the same days, which is why parish life thickens during a fast: there are more services, more confessions, and a great many shared meals of rice and vegetables.
And fasting never travels alone. In the Sermon on the Mount it stands with prayer and almsgiving, and the three are meant to be done together. Fasting without prayer is only a diet with a religious label; fasting without almsgiving is thrift. Fr. Seraphim Rose returned constantly to the ordinary Christian duties — giving alms, visiting the sick, helping those in need — as the daily test of whether any of the rest is real.
If you are starting
Begin smaller than you think you should. A beginner who keeps Wednesday and Friday faithfully for a year has done more than one who attempts the full Lenten rule in March and abandons it in the second week. Consistency in something modest builds what heroics in something large destroys.
Speak to a priest before you set your rule, and set it in advance rather than deciding at each meal, which turns every meal into a negotiation. Do not announce what you are doing; the instruction to wash your face is practical advice as much as a warning. And when you fail — everyone fails — the response is to begin again at the next meal rather than to write off the season.
The first and important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 5/18 June 1979, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
Health, age and the blessing of a priest
The fasting rule has always been applied with dispensations, and asking for one is not a failure. Children, the elderly, the sick, the pregnant and nursing, those on medication, diabetics, people doing heavy physical work, travellers and soldiers have all been treated differently, and a parish priest can adjust the rule for any of them. Anyone with a history of disordered eating should say so, and should expect the fast to be modified or set aside.
Hospitality outranks strictness. If you are a guest and meat is set before you, the older Christian instinct is to eat it and say thank you rather than wound a host or make a scene about your own discipline — “eat such things as are set before you” (Luke 10:8, KJV). In a city where families are often mixed and meals are often shared, this comes up constantly, and the answer is usually to ask your priest rather than to improvise a rule of your own.
None of this is a loophole, and a relaxed rule is not a second-class one. It is how the discipline has always been meant to work: a standard held up honestly and without embarrassment, then applied to particular people by someone who knows their circumstances. The alternative — a single rule enforced identically on the frail and the strong — would be easier to administer and much worse for souls.
The danger nearest to hand
The risk of fasting is not that someone will eat a biscuit. It is pride, and Christ named it in a parable about a man whose fasting was real: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are … I fast twice in the week” (Luke 18:11–12, KJV). That man’s fast was genuine. It made him worse. A fast that produces a sharper eye for other people’s eating has gone wrong at the root, however exactly it is kept.
Converts are especially exposed, because a new rule is a visible achievement and the temptation to audit oneself against it is strong. Fr. Seraphim Rose, an American convert who spent his last years writing against precisely this tendency among Western converts, returned to it again and again in his letters. To one young man who had written describing how far he had come, he replied bluntly, and the reply is worth keeping where it can be seen.
You are too young in Orthodoxy to be evaluating your spiritual growth—that is actually a sign of your pride.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 22 June 1976, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
An open door
Many Christians of other confessions fast, and many do not; Saint Paul told the Romans that the one who eats should not despise the one who abstains, and the one who abstains should not judge the one who eats, “for God hath received him” (Romans 14:3, KJV). That verse is addressed to Orthodox readers of this page at least as much as to anyone else.
If you are curious rather than committed, you are welcome to keep a fast day with this parish and see what it is like from the inside. Come to a Lenten service, eat afterwards with whoever is there, and ask your questions over the food. Most of what is worth knowing about fasting is learned that way rather than from an article.