Feasting Soberly

Benedicamus Domino!

There is a teaching in Orthodox Christianity that everything should be done moderately, even feasting during the week after Easter. Just as when we fast, we don't generally cut out all foods, when we feast, we ought not to forget why we're feasting and simply fill the belly. Fasting and feasting are both meant to be looked at as spiritually as possible. We fast as a way to help us to calm our desires and to make our hearts more peaceful. This really does happen in my experience. If I spend a day or a week or several weeks fasting from animal products and such, it makes me feel less bound up in my body and its needs and more able to focus on praying and doing other spiritually beneficial activities.

However, feasting has its place as well. Feasting is for us a bodily incarnation of our spiritual reward, of the love and mercy and bounty of God. However, does this mean that we have to overindulge and fill our bellies to repletion? Personally, I don't think so. What I do think is that eating more mindfully is the key, at least for me. Let others do as they wish, and certainly, do not go hungry when a feast is before you.

However, here is a very practical tip for eating more mindfully, and I find that this actually works. If I eat while I'm distracted from the process of eating by TV or some other form of entertainment, I tend to eat more quickly and to shovel more food into my mouth than I do when I'm actually thinking about what I'm eating. When I try consciously to be aware of how I'm eating, of the act of putting food into my mouth, I tend to take smaller bites, to eat more slowly, and consequently to become full while having consumed less food. It is said that it takes the brain twenty minutes to process the fact that the body has had enough food, so if I give it that chance, it is more likely to happen with a smaller portion of food when I am eating more slowly and carefully. The times that I ask for second helpings of a meal are always and without acception the times when I eat the first helping very quickly and without paying attention to it. This, incidentally, is what restaurants count on when they conceive of their large appetizer platters and their enormous desserts which are piled higher and built bigger than any human-sized dessert should be! I know that I still have a long way to go, but I for one want to stop the madness! I want to actually listen to my body and its needs regarding food, rather than satisfying some strange desire to fill myself so that there is no emptiness anywhere within me. I think that on some level, food is for me a substitute for personal fulfillment, and I can see why the church fathers spent so much time talking about Gluttony as the basis for all other vices or passions.

Gluttony can hide all the other passions from view by its all-pervading nature. It can also pretend to be a solution to the other passions. Getting the food that we crave will, we think at least, help our acquisitive nature or our greed. Eating food can sometimes be used as a dulling agent for anger. Are you despondent? Eat some chocolate! Are you very proud of an accomplishment--I mean self-congratulatory about it in an overblown way? Eat food to celebrate! There's just so much that an overdependence on food can get in the way of!

And for me the worst thing of all about my love affair with the wrong kinds of food is that I cease to be grateful for what I eat. I cease to be grateful for anything that I have in this life, and it all begins with my attitude towards food.

So, while I can't promise that I will eat food always with no distractions, I am going to try very hard to be mindful of what I'm eating and to let my body tell me when it's full, rather than simply gorging myself until I can gorge no more. For it is this more peaceful relationship with food which will, in the end, dispose my body, mind and spirit to receive joy in a more awakened way, and I will be able consciously and meaningfully to say:

Deo Gratias!