Lazarus, not Kierkegaard

This sickness is not unto death.

The True Nature of Fasting

"Our Lenten abstinence does not imply a rejection of God's creation. But, living as we do in a fallen world and suffering as we do from the consequences of sin, both original and personal, are not pure; and so we have need of fasting. Evil resides not in created things as such but in our attitude toward them, that is, in our will. The purpose of fasting, then, is not to repudiate the divine creation but to cleanse our will. During the fast we deny our bodily impulses -- for example, our spontaneous appetite for food and drink -- not because these impulses are in themselves evil, but because they have been disordered by sin and require to be purified through self-discipline. In this way, asceticism is not a fight against but for the body; the aim of fasting is to purge the body from alien defilement and to render it spiritual. By rejecting what is sinful in our will, we do not destroy the God-created body but restore it to its true balance and freedom. In Father Sergei Bulgakov's phrase, we kill the flesh in order to acquire a body . . .

Ascetic self-discipline, then, signifies a rejection of the world, only in so far as it is corrupted by the fall; of the body, only in so far as it is dominated by sinful passions. Lust excludes love: so long as we lust after other persons or other things, we cannot truly love them. By delivering us from lust, the fast renders us capable of genuine love. No longer ruled by the selfish desire to grasp and exploit, we begin to see the world with the eyes of Adam in Paradise. Our self-denial is the path that leads to self-affirmation; it is our means of entry into the cosmic liturgy whereby all things visible and invisible ascribe glory to their Creator."

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, "The True Nature of Fasting," The Lenten Triodion.