Fasting and feasting has long been a part of all the sane religions of the world. YHWH kept the Jews busy with feasting and fasting all the year long, both to remember and to celebrate His work among them and their identity as His people. The Muslim calendar holds its two festivals in lunar equilibrium, keeping a balance not unlike the finely-tuned centripetal motion with which the moon orbits our earth. The Greeks, Romans, and various pagan cults of the world each have acknowledged something of the sanity of the rhythmic motion between celebration and mortification; and the Christian Church, having already celebrated Fat Tuesday, is quite solidly begun upon its Lenten fast, even while eyeing Resurrection Sunday with an ever greater longing—to say nothing of growling stomachs.
It is the modern, secular man who has settled into an unholy and insane destruction of food through dieting. It is modern materialism, or perhaps only reductionism, that describes food as merely fuel for the body and presumes that, whatever life might be, it is not something worth celebrating in the way that most men have always celebrated—with a cornucopia of victuals and a liberality of drink. Such a viewpoint not only runs the risk of dehumanizing mankind and destroying civilization, it will most certainly conclude in tragedy: men will never again relish the simple yet monumental achievement of a Dutch baby browning in the oven while the family gathers in anticipation around the breakfast table on a Sunday morning.
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