Today is the first day of Lent for the Orthodox (as well as the Byzantine Catholics who use the Julian Calendar). Last night at Vespers (which is the beginning of the liturgical day of Monday for those of the Byzantine tradition) the priest put aside his bright vestments toward the end of the service after announcing the beginning of Lent. At the end of Vespers he began the ceremony of mutual forgiveness by asking everyone in the congregation for forgiveness. Then each person in turn went up to embrace him and ask forgiveness of him, and then began forming a line at his right. The next person went up embraced the priest asking for forgiveness, then embraced the first person each asking each other for forgiveness, etc. During all this the choir sang the Easter Praises which like our Paschal Proclamation introduce their midnight Easter Liturgy. Those praises include the words "let us embrace each other, let us treat as brothers even those who hate us, for Christ has risen"
The Orthodox fast is very severe, almost a vegan diet. I am glad to be a guest at their liturgies, I would not want to live their fast. However, in 2011, I proposed in a post on PrayTell blog that we fast from Television, perhaps something more difficult and more efficacious than fasting from food. Here is the post, after the break I have summarized its basic arguments without all the data.
1. Time more than food is our basic resource, the foundation of our lives. Time studies comparing self-report with diaries have shown that we don’t have a good sense of how we use our time.
2. Research using time diaries has shown that over recent decades we have had increased leisure time because both paid and unpaid work time have decreased. The increased leisure has gone into watching television. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam attributed much of the decline in voluntary organizations to the advent of television. Television (and now the internet) is readily available to fill ten minute to several hour slots without much more effort than clicking a button or a mouse.
3. In centuries past it made a lot of sense to fast from food. At that time food production, processing, and meal preparation and consumption occupied much of peoples time. Cutting down on the amount and types of food freed time for the other works of Lent, almsgiving and prayer. Food was also scarce, so it made sense at the end of the winter to ration it as people geared up for another growing and harvesting season. Food fasting during Lent made sense socially and economically in an agrarian society. Today fasting from food frees up little time or money to do other things.
4. One important insight about time usage is our ability to accomplish many things through the use of small amounts of time. One of my graduate mentors, Bob Boice, made a career of advising professors to increase both their publication rates as well as the quality of their teaching by focusing upon using small amounts of time (fifteen minutes here and there) rather than setting aside large time intervals, e.g. several hours (most of which ends up being wasted). He has many gems of advice about how to do this.
5. In my post I used the above insights to advocate the personal praying of the Divine Office (aka the Liturgy of the Hours). There are now a variety of resources on the internet for doing this that could be used in small pieces of time. Recorded choral forms of Evening Prayer lasting for about thirty or forty minutes and spoked forms that last ten to twenty minutes are available at the click of a button. Using the pause control can easily distribute them into smaller units. Spread over time it eventually accumulates. Robert Taft, my mentor on the Liturgy of the Hours, claimed the basic idea behind the Divine Office is to “pray always.” Technology has made that easier.