On Not Talking About Your Fast

"Do not be like the hypocrites, of a sad countenance; for they disfigure their faces so they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your Father who is in the secret place."

This is one of the more uncomfortable passages to sit with, because Christ is not warning about lying. He is warning about telling the truth in a particular way. The hypocrites in question were genuinely fasting. Their fast was real. The problem was that it was being observed by an audience, and the audience became the point.

There is a modern version of this and it does not involve disfiguring your face. It involves a certain tone of voice at a work lunch. "Oh — I can't, I'm fasting." Said lightly, with a small apologetic smile, in a way that invites the follow-up question. And the follow-up question comes, because people are polite, and then you get to explain about Orthodoxy and the forty days and no meat or dairy or oil, and you watch them be impressed, and something in you enjoys it.

I have done this more times than I want to count. It is very hard to notice from the inside, because every individual sentence is true and none of it is boasting exactly. It is just... available. The information is right there, and it is interesting, and mentioning it costs nothing except the entire point of the exercise.

The practical alternative is duller than it sounds and works better than it has any right to. Do not announce it. Eat what you can eat and do not narrate the decision. At a restaurant, order something you can have. If someone asks why you are not having the chicken, "I'm good with this, thanks" is a complete sentence and almost nobody pushes past it. If someone genuinely asks — really asks, out of curiosity rather than politeness — answer plainly and briefly and then change the subject. There is a difference between hiding your faith and performing your discipline, and the line is usually obvious in the moment even when it is hard to describe afterward.

The harder case is at church, which is where I get it wrong most often. Among Orthodox people the fast is common ground and therefore conversation, and it slides very easily from conversation into comparison. Who is keeping it strictly. Who is doing xerophagy the whole first week. Whether so-and-so's parish is lax about oil. This is all much more corrosive than the work lunch, because it comes dressed as fellowship and it has the parish's whole vocabulary available to it.

The old saying is that you should not measure another man's fast, and the reason usually given is charity — you do not know what his priest blessed, what his health is, what his household is like. That is true. But there is a second reason, which is that the act of measuring is itself the failure. The moment I am ranking, I am no longer fasting toward God. I am competing, and competition needs a scoreboard, and the scoreboard is the reward Christ was talking about.

Anoint your head and wash your face. Cook something good, eat it without commentary, go to the services, and let the whole thing be boring to everyone but God. That is the instruction, and it turns out to be the most difficult part of the fast — considerably harder than giving up cheese.