I am not good at fasting.
I want to say that at the top, because if you are a catechumen or newly received and you have just discovered that the Orthodox Church has four fasting seasons, a rule for most Wednesdays and Fridays, and a calendar that seems to know what you had for breakfast, there is a decent chance you are already keeping score against yourself. I have been keeping that score for years. I do not go to Liturgy as often as I should either. Some of that is life and some of it is me, and I have learned to tell the difference more slowly than I would like.
I used to bring this to my spiritual father. I would sit down and explain, with some feeling, that I could not fast the way other people in the parish seemed to fast, and that I felt the gap between us, and that I suspected the gap said something about me. He would listen to all of it. And then he would smile — he had a particular smile for this, I think because he had heard it from a hundred people before me — and he would say four words.
Do what you can.
A few years ago he fell asleep in the Lord. I still hear him say it, usually around the second week of a fast, usually right when I need it. I am writing this down partly so that someone else gets to hear it too.
Because here is the thing I wish someone had told me at the beginning: the fasting rules themselves are not that hard. They are specific, they are finite, and you can learn them in ten minutes. What is hard is the weight people put on top of them — the scorekeeping, the comparison, the private conviction that you are the one person in the nave who is doing it wrong. Almost none of that comes from the Church. Some of it, in my case, I suspect I carried in from the Catholicism of my childhood, where I learned early to measure myself against a rule and come up short.
So let me do the simple part first. Here is what Orthodox fasting actually is, mechanically, on paper.
What We Set Aside
The traditional strict rule sets aside these things, with the details applied under your priest’s guidance:
- Meat, including poultry, and anything made from it
- Dairy and eggs — milk, butter, cheese, yogurt
- Fish with backbones
- Olive oil — treatment of other cooking oils varies by tradition
- Wine, and by extension alcohol
And here is the part that surprises people: shellfish are permitted. Shrimp, clams, mussels, calamari, lobster. The old reckoning is that these are bloodless creatures, so they were never counted among the flesh foods. Which means an Orthodox fast day can, technically, involve a shrimp stir-fry, and every convert discovers this fact with a mixture of delight and suspicion.
You will also hear the phrase fish, wine and oil used as a kind of dial. The Church does not set the same intensity on every fast day. Some days allow wine and oil. Some days allow fish as well. The parish calendar marks this, and once you know to look for it, the calendar stops being a wall of rules and starts being a set of permissions.
The food list is only part of the rule. Traditional fasting also includes moderation, and stricter observance limits the number and timing of meals. That is not a calorie-counting assignment or a rule to take on without guidance. If you stumble, speak honestly with your priest and begin again.
Wednesday and Friday
Most weeks of the year, Wednesday and Friday are fast days.
Not arbitrarily. Wednesday is the day Judas agreed to hand Christ over, and Friday is the day of the Crucifixion. Two days a week, the Church puts the betrayal and the Cross back into the middle of your ordinary life, and it does it through your kitchen rather than through your feelings, which is merciful — feelings are unreliable and lunch happens whether you are moved or not.
In practice, your priest may give you a more moderate rule than the strict monastic reckoning. Wednesday and Friday also follow the season and its feast-day allowances. Take the details from your parish calendar and your priest, not from the person whose lunch you happened to notice.
The Four Seasons
The fixed dates below are Church-calendar dates. On the New Calendar they currently match the civil calendar. On the Old, Julian Calendar they currently fall thirteen days later: the Nativity Fast, for example, runs November 28 through January 6 in civil dates, with Christmas on January 7. Pascha and the seasons tied to it need your parish’s own calendar. One calendar borrowed from the wrong parish can make this needlessly confusing.
There are four fasting seasons in the year. Naming them all at once makes them look like a great deal; laid out across twelve months, they are simply the shape of the Orthodox year.
Great Lent — the longest and the strictest. It begins on Clean Monday, not Ash Wednesday, and runs forty days to the Friday before Lazarus Saturday. Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday follow, then Holy Week; the fasting continues through Holy Saturday. The date moves every year with Pascha, so this is one to take from your parish calendar rather than from memory. The Church eases you into it rather than dropping you: in the weeks before, there is a Sunday after which meat is set aside, and then a final week of dairy, and only then the fast proper. Even the calendar does not expect you to go from a Tuesday to Great Lent in one step.
The Apostles’ Fast — begins the Monday after All Saints, the Sunday after Pentecost, and leads to Saints Peter and Paul on June 29. Its length depends on Pascha and the calendar used for that fixed feast. With the New Calendar and the usual Orthodox Paschal reckoning, it can be very short or absent. On the Old Calendar it remains, leading to July 12 in current civil dates. This is another one to take from your parish calendar. If you have ever wondered why nobody mentioned this one to you, that may be why.
The Dormition Fast — August 1 through August 14, a fortnight, ending with the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos on the fifteenth. Short, and among the most loved, perhaps because two weeks is a length a person can actually see the end of.
The Nativity Fast — November 15 through December 24, forty days. Also called the Saint Philip’s Fast. This is the one most likely to be next on your horizon, and it is worth saying that it runs straight through the season when the rest of the country is at its most enthusiastic about cheese platters and office parties. That is not a design flaw. It is the point, and it is also the reason this particular fast tends to be where new Orthodox Christians first feel genuinely out of step with the world around them.
The Nativity and Apostles’ Fasts have different allowances on different days, and the Nativity Fast becomes stricter as the feast approaches. A single weekly menu will not cover every tradition or feast-day exception. Follow your parish calendar and the rule your priest gives you.
The Single Fast Days
There are also fast days outside the four seasons: January 5, the Eve of Theophany; August 29, the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist; and September 14, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. These are Church-calendar dates, too. Check your parish’s directions for the food allowances when they fall on a Saturday or Sunday.
The Fast-Free Weeks
Here is the section nobody tells the catechumens about, and it changes the whole picture.
There are periods in the year when the Church tells you to stop. Not to moderate — to stop. No Wednesday fast, no Friday fast. Communion preparation still follows your priest’s directions; fast-free does not mean prayer-free.
- Bright Week, the week after Pascha. The long Lenten and Holy Week fast has ended, and the Church declares a week free from the usual food fast. You have just been at the empty tomb. Eat something.
- The week after Pentecost.
- The week after the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, early in the pre-Lenten run-up — a week deliberately set fast-free so that nobody mistakes fasting itself for the point. The Pharisee in that parable, it is worth remembering, fasted twice a week and said so out loud.
- Christmas through January 4, eleven days inclusive. January 5, the Eve of Theophany, is a fast day; Theophany itself is January 6. On the Old Calendar these currently fall on January 7–17, January 18, and January 19 in civil dates.
I mention these not as loopholes but because they tell you something about the mind of the Church. A tradition that wanted you exhausted and scrupulous would not build four holidays from fasting into its own calendar. The fast exists to serve the feast. It was never the other way around.
The Fast Before Communion
Separate from all of the above is the eucharistic fast: not eating or drinking before receiving Communion. For a morning Liturgy, fasting from midnight is common. Follow your priest’s directions, especially for an evening service or when health or medication affects what you can safely do.
The spirit of it is preparation rather than endurance. A normal Saturday supper is not an obstacle. Medication is not an obstacle. Small children are not held to it, and infants certainly are not. If you are unsure how it applies to you, that is a question for your priest, and it is a good first question to bring him.
Who Is Excused, and Why That Is Not a Loophole
The Church has always made room for people’s circumstances: young children, pregnant and nursing mothers, the elderly, the sick, and anyone whose medication or condition makes the food rules unwise. Travel and a household where others do not fast can also call for an adjusted rule. These are things to bring to your priest, not tests to fail in silence.
Someone else’s table can take some new converts a while. Gratitude and kindness belong there, too. But being a guest is not an automatic exemption from the fast. Ask your priest how to handle these meals, and, when you can, speak gently with your host beforehand.
And notice that the tradition does not simply excuse people and walk away. Those who cannot keep the food fast are still invited to keep something — a smaller abstention, a day or two a week, whatever is possible. Which is the whole principle in miniature. The point was never the exact contents of your plate. The point is that you are participating, in the measure you actually have.
The Part That Is Actually Hard
None of this is difficult to understand. Where it goes wrong is in the head.
The Fathers are blunt about it, and they are blunt in the direction opposite from the one you expect. They do not warn that you will fast too little. They warn that you will fast from food while your tongue stays vicious, that you will keep a perfect Lent and be insufferable about it, that you will hold the rule and lose the reason. A fast that makes you harsh with your family is not a successful fast with an unfortunate side effect. It has simply failed, and in a way that is harder to see than a hamburger on a Friday.
Which is also why fasting is not a public event. The instruction in the Gospel is to do it without showing it (Matthew 6:16–18). You are not supposed to know what the person beside you in the nave is eating this week, and the fact that you cannot know is a protection — it means the comparison you are running in your head is being run against a person you invented.
If there is one thing to take from a first year of fasting, it is this: the rule is for you, not the reverse. It is a tool the Church hands you for the specific work of learning that you are not ruled by your appetites. A tool you use badly is still a tool you are using. A tool you refuse to pick up because you might use it badly is just a tool on a shelf.
Beginning
So begin somewhere small and real, and begin with your priest.
That last part is not a formality. Orthodox fasting is not meant to be self-administered from a website, including this one. The rules are the Church’s; the application is worked out between you and the man who knows your circumstances, your health, your household, and your season of life. Go to him and say: I am new, and I want to keep the fast, and here is what my life actually looks like. He will help you. That conversation is the tradition operating exactly as designed.
Start with one Wednesday. Or the Nativity Fast, but only the meat. Or the whole rule for the first week, and whatever you can hold after that. Any of those is a real beginning, and the Church has never asked for more than a real beginning.
I still do this badly, most years. I am telling you so that if you also do it badly, you will know the company you are in, and you will not mistake a hard fast for a failed one.
Do what you can.
He was right, and it took me years to hear it as generosity rather than as a lowered bar. It is the most demanding thing anyone ever said to me about fasting, because it removes every excuse while removing every impossible standard. You cannot do what someone else can. You can do what you can.
May the Lord grant you a fast that is light where it should be light and clarifying where it should be clarifying, and may He give you a good priest, a patient household, and the grace to begin again at the next meal.