The Assistant Bishop to the Suceava Archdiocese, His Grace Damaschin of Dorna offered some advice for Lent in a video published by Trinitas TV.

“Fasting is not just about abstaining from certain foods, that would be too little, it would be a detoxification cure, but that is not the role of fasting. You reduce the amount of food not for this physical asceticism but to help or add something spiritual with this physical need.”

“Never have the elders placed so much strict emphasis on abstinence from food. The elders used to say, “we learned to be killers of passions, not of bodies.”

“The Venerable Sophrony of Essex said: “give the body as much as it can bear and give the rest of your attention to the dimension of the soul that you would like to have during a period of fasting to be closer to God.”

“We no longer eat so much, so often and abundantly, physical food, but we nourish ourselves more with a book, the Holy Scriptures. Therefore, there must be a difference between the period of fasting and the period before or after fasting regarding the intensity of the spiritual work,” His Grace noted.

“If it’s just abstaining from food, it is little. But you can’t avoid this part. You cannot have a deeper spiritual activity with a full stomach. After a hearty meal, the body is focused on the digestion process. So you cannot concentrate on doing an intense brain activity after a hearty meal,” the assistant bishop to the Suceava Archdiocese explained.

Digital fast

“We could observe a digital fast, limiting access to our phones. Then, from 10 p.m., everyone can switch the phone to airplane mode.”

Assistant Bishop Damaschin said, “it’s not easy because it’s a kind of addiction. The phone is seen as a kind of extension of the hand.”

Checking your phone, even with no notification or call, has become an instinct which is not an actual need.“This extension of the hand has become a problem that the specialists now acknowledge not only from a spiritual perspective. So if it’s a problem, we must see what we can do,” bishop Damaschin cautioned.

“We must learn to educate ourselves because otherwise, we get exhausted. The fasting period is an auspicious time in which we can be attentive to our senses in the perspective of limitation.”

Bishop Damaschin concluded by explaining that man’s desire to go to shops and buy things actually shows an inner need that man does not fill with what he needs. Unfortunately, this “is sin; this is how we miss the target and remain empty inside.”

Photography courtesy of the Basilica.ro Files