The Fourth Week Is the Hard One

Everyone warns you about the first week of Great Lent. Clean Monday, the Great Canon, five days of xerophagy while your body loudly objects to the absence of coffee and cheese. It is genuinely difficult and it is also, in a way, the easy part. You go into the first week braced. You have been thinking about it since Meatfare. The whole parish is in it together, the services are long and beautiful, and there is a kind of momentum in being at the start of something.

The fourth week is the one that gets people, and nobody warns you about it.

By the fourth week the novelty is gone. The first-week resolve has worn down to habit, and habit has worn down to grind. You are not particularly hungry anymore — the body adapts faster than people expect — but you are tired in a flat, uninteresting way. You have eaten lentils enough times that you have opinions about lentils. Pascha is still weeks off and does not feel like it is approaching. The Cross has been brought out in the middle of the church at the midpoint, which is exactly the Church admitting that this is where you need something to look at.

What happens to most people in the fourth week is not a dramatic fall. It is a quiet slackening. You stop planning meals and start improvising them badly. You skip a service because you are tired, and the next week you skip two. The fast becomes a set of rules you are technically observing while the thing the rules were for has gone somewhere else. That is the actual danger of the fourth week, and it is much harder to notice than a plate of forbidden food.

A few things help, and none of them are spiritual advice.

Cook something you actually want to eat. If the fast has become fourteen consecutive nights of boiled vegetables, the problem is not your will. The fourth week is a good time to make something with real ambition behind it — a proper curry, a pot of beans that took two hours, bread you baked yourself. There is no virtue in eating badly. The Fathers fasted from meat, not from flavor, and the monasteries of Athos have never been known for joyless cooking.

Eat more than you have been. A great deal of what feels like spiritual dryness in week four is a caloric deficit that has been accumulating quietly since Clean Monday. If you are cold all the time, waking at four in the morning, and short with your family, that is a body running low, and no amount of resolve fixes it. Add legumes and nuts and oil on the days oil is permitted, and see whether the fog lifts.

Go to the services. This is the one piece of actual advice, and it is the one most people abandon precisely when it would help. The Presanctified Liturgy on a Wednesday evening in the fourth week is a strange and good thing, and it is doing something that no amount of dietary discipline does on its own.

And stop counting the days. Whatever you do, do not calculate how many remain, because the number is always larger than you hoped and the arithmetic is a spiritually useless exercise.

The fifth week is easier. I have no explanation for this and no theology to attach to it, but it is consistently true. Something settles around the Great Canon on Thursday of the fifth week, and from there Lazarus Saturday is close enough to see. You just have to get through the fourth.