Has anyone heard anything regarding this?

MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS,

i was wondering if anyone has any knowledge regarding the upcoming "40 Days for 40 Years Fast that they would care to share.

Normally i ignore things like this, but for some reason i can't let go of the rationale for the Fast and the logic behind it--(perhaps that is guilt for my being an over-the-hill "flower child" :~: )

Anyway, if you would care to check it out, the "address", or rather, one of the addresses is:

http://www.louengle.com/articles/6

There are several other information/contact addresses at the very bottom of the article.

i would be most interested in hearing any reactions, thoughts, feelings, or yea's and nay's you may have regarding this. i am not sure why i feel drawn to it?!

BLESSINGS AND LOVE TO ALL,
ephraim

Very interesting...very interesting indeed!


Ephraim, I assume you are Orthodox? (Honestly, I never looked at your denomination symbol at the other site) IF you are, than you are aware of how important it is in the Church at certain times of the year such as Pasxa being the main fast before the resurrection.

I know one thing. In my walk with our Lord, though I am Orthodox for marriage....because of it, my walk is UNBELIEVABLE! In discussions with my friend, a priest, even he will conclude, that those in this religion who fast because it is the right thing to do, versus those who fast because they are LED to do it carry an enormous difference. If you feel LED to do it...do it! Just because we are Orthodox, does not mean we have to follow the exact rules of the Church....we follow the rules of our LORD first and foremost.

My priest, who is a rule follower, also does not follow ALL the rules of the Church for he knows deep inside him that many are the control aspect. He is very strict on Following GODS rules..for him. To Please God, even if it means he gets repromanded by the arch-bishops and metropolitan....which, beleive me, he has.

The Lord sees our hearts and knows what is in them. If you choose to do this fast from your heart, even if it is NOT to follow what that site suggests, you are still cleansing your soul and focusing upon our Lord. That is the most important thing.

I label myself, the unOrthodox Orthodox. And the blessings I have received in the past year from my journey through church and LISTENING to our Lord have been amazing.....at this point I have not been to church since a week before Christmas....on a few occasions yes....and minus a few moments in Church, I have never felt so close to our Lord as I do now. And in the year before I found a church here to go to. Our relationship goes beyond the walls....and into our hearts.

Will you fast for your Lord and pray for a reviving change? Or will you fast because its the right thing to do? You know the answer....and so does our Lord. What matters is what HE thinks of you! And I am certain that He stands above you smiling upon you daily!!!!!!!!!!

Much love!!!!!

Christ is My Life! wrote:
Ephraim, I assume you are Orthodox? (Honestly, I never looked at your denomination symbol at the other site) IF you are, than you are aware of how important it is in the Church at certain times of the year such as Pasxa being the main fast before the resurrection.

Yes, i am well aware of the need for, and the value of, fasting. This is one of the greatest gifts Orthodoxy has given to me. Times of fasting have been times of great blessings for me--without exception. What little progress i have made spiritually seems, in the main, to have occured during periods of fasting. It's like during Great Lent i store up spiritual goodies which take the rest of the year to digest and assimilate.

Christ is My Life! wrote:Just because we are Orthodox, does not mean we have to follow the exact rules of the Church....we follow the rules of our LORD first and foremost.

Well, in all honesty, i believe that the rules of the Church and the rules of our Lord are one--otherwise i wouldn't have converted to Orthodoxy. i have only been Orthodox for 7 years or so, but i have yet to find any "rules" with which i have a problem or can't understand the rationale behind. Some my flesh perhaps does not like or agree with, but i see their purpose and my need to follow them. i have spent almost all my life in a state of confusion and delusion--blown hither and thither by the winds--as i think St James said. i need structure and i need perimeters to keep my tendency to be easily led astray in check. i guess you could say rules make me feel safe. Sometimes i envy those who can "wing it"--but most of the time i am content. (i wonder sometimes how my need for obedience can co-exist with my difficulty with pride. Perhaps they balance each other out.)

Christ is My Life! wrote:My priest, who is a rule follower, also does not follow ALL the rules of the Church for he knows deep inside him that many are the control aspect. He is very strict on Following GODS rules..for him. To Please God, even if it means he gets repromanded by the arch-bishops and metropolitan....which, beleive me, he has.

i wonder about those who have problems with rules--thinking specifically of my days as a Catholic with all the nuns demonstrating for female Priesthood or Church-sanctioned Abortions, etc. If a person has such serious disagreements with the structure that exists, why not go somewhere else more compatable? It's like if i wanted to play football but didn't want to use that funny shaped ball, or thought you should only have to make 5 yards in 4 downs, or wanted 15 men on a team. The rules of the game are what makes the game--the rules of the Church are what makes the Church. If i don't like the rules perhaps i should find another Church.

The rules are what drew me to Orthodoxy and, by following them i have reaped the benefits they have promised--do this and this and this, and this will happen. i have found it to be so, and have been blessed by it.

Christ is My Life! wrote:The Lord sees our hearts and knows what is in them. If you choose to do this fast from your heart, even if it is NOT to follow what that site suggests, you are still cleansing your soul and focusing upon our Lord. That is the most important thing.

Again, given my past history and my knowledge of the dangers and past consequences of my "improvising", i am loath to not do things as written. (Were i a musician, i would never make in in Jazz!) i am just so afraid of my own ideas as these have been so destructive in the past and appear, in retrospect, as having been planted by the Evil One for my twisted little mind to latch on to and run with. For this reason i love the Orthodox idea of being under the authority of a Spiritual Father who is responsible for your spiritual direction and is responsible before God for mistakes in that direction.

Christ is My Life! wrote:Will you fast for your Lord and pray for a reviving change? Or will you fast because its the right thing to do? You know the answer....and so does our Lord. What matters is what HE thinks of you! And I am certain that He stands above you smiling upon you daily!!!!!!!!!!

Sooooo . . . anyway, i was hoping to get some knowledge of this Fast beyond the description i received--who these people are, etc. i have decided to do it, as has my wife who is non-Orthodox. i am excited, if for no other reason than this is the first thing we have done spiritually together in 32 years of marriage--but that's another story. i do feel quite drawn to the concept, the rationale, and the goal. i hope it is God and not just another tweaking of the flesh.

i apologize for all the wandering ranting. i'm not sure where it came from.

MUCH LOVE IN CHRIST,
ephraim

Origin of the custom


Some of the Fathers as early as the fifth century supported the view that this forty days' fast was of Apostolic institution. For example, St. Leo (d. 461) exhorts his hearers to abstain that they may "fulfill with their fasts the Apostolic institution of the forty days" — ut apostolica institutio quadraginta dierum jejuniis impleatur (P.L., LIV, 633), and the historian Socrates (d. 433) and St. Jerome (d. 420) use similar language (P.G., LXVII, 633; P.L., XXII, 475).
But the best modern scholars are almost unanimous in rejecting this view, for in the existing remains of the first three centuries we find both considerable diversity of practice regarding the fast before Easter and also a gradual process of development in the matter of its duration. The passage of primary importance is one quoted by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., V, xxiv) from a letter of St. Irenaeus to Pope Victor in connection with the Easter controversy. There Irenaeus says that there is not only a controversy about the time of keeping Easter but also regarding the preliminary fast. "For", he continues, "some think they ought to fast for one day, others for two days, and others even for several, while others reckon forty hours both of day and night to their fast". He also urges that this variety of usage is of ancient date, which implies that there could have been no Apostolic tradition on the subject. Rufinus, who translated Eusebius into Latin towards the close of the fourth century, seems so to have punctuated this passage as to make Irenaeus say that some people fasted for forty days. Formerly some difference of opinion existed as to the proper reading, but modern criticism (e.g., in the edition of Schwartz commissioned by the Berlin Academy) pronounces strongly in favor of the text translated above. We may then fairly conclude that Irenaeus about the year 190 knew nothing of any Easter fast of forty days.
The same inference must be drawn from the language of Tertullian only a few years later. When writing as a Montanist, he contrasts the very slender term of fasting observed by the Catholics (i.e., "the days on which the bridegroom was taken away", probably meaning the Friday and Saturday of Holy Week) with the longer but still restricted period of a fortnight which was kept by the Montanists. No doubt he was referring to fasting of a very strict kind (xerophagiæ — dry fasts), but there is no indication in his works, though he wrote an entire treatise "De Jejunio", and often touches upon the subject elsewhere, that he was acquainted with any period of forty days consecrated to more or less continuous fasting (see Tertullian, "De Jejun.", ii and xiv; cf. "de Orat.", xviii; etc.).
And there is the same silence observable in all the pre-Nicene Fathers, though many had occasion to mention such an Apostolic institution if it had existed. We may note for example that there is no mention of Lent in St. Dionysius of Alexandria (ed. Feltoe, 94 sqq.) or in the "Didascalia", which Funk attributes to about the yearkú yet both speak diffusely of the paschal fast.
Further, there seems much to suggest that the Church in the Apostolic Age designed to commemorate the Resurrection of Christ, not by an annual, but by a weekly celebration (see "the Month", April 1910, 337 sqq.). If this be so, the Sunday liturgy constituted the weekly memorial of the Resurrection, and the Friday fast that of the Death of Christ. Such a theory offers a natural explanation of the wide divergence which we find existing in the latter part of the second century regarding both the proper time for keeping Easter, and also the manner of the paschal fast. Christians were at one regarding the weekly observance of the Sunday and the Friday, which was primitive, but the annual Easter festival was something superimposed by a process of natural development, and it was largely influenced by the conditions locally existing in the different Churches of the East and West. Moreover, with the Easter festival there seems also to have established itself a preliminary fast, not as yet anywhere exceeding a week in duration, but very severe in character, which commemorated the Passion, or more generally, "the days on which the bridegroom was taken away".
Be this as it may, we find in the early years of the fourth century the first mention of the term tessarakoste. It occurs in the fifth canon of the Council of Nicea (A.D. 325), where there is only question of the proper time for celebrating a synod, and it is conceivable that it may refer not to a period but to a definite festival, e.g., the Feast of the Ascension, or the Purification, which Ætheria calls quadragesimæ de Epiphania. But we have to remember that the older word, pentekoste (Pentecost) from meaning the fiftieth day, had come to denote the whole of the period (which we should call Paschal Time) between Easter Sunday and Whit-Sunday (cf. Tertullian, "De Idololatria", xiv, — "pentecosten implere non poterunt"). In any case it is certain from the "Festal Letters" of St. Athanasius that in 331 the saint enjoined upon his flock a period of forty days of fasting preliminary to, but not inclusive of, the stricter fast of Holy Week, and secondly that in 339 the same Father, after having traveled to Rome and over the greater part of Europe, wrote in the strongest terms to urge this observance upon the people of Alexandria as one that was universally practiced, "to the end that while all the world is fasting, we who are in Egypt should not become a laughing-stock as the only people who do not fast but take our pleasure in those days". Although Funk formerly maintained that a Lent of forty days was not known in the West before the time of St. Ambrose, this is evidence which cannot be set aside.

With this aside, I have no link to any denomination or man made religion. I would say brother fasting is obedience to God, not a structured event that a particular set of rules or man puts forth at a particular time. Now if a group gets together and needs answers, needs deliverance and decides to fast that is a powerful tool to speak to our Father. Simply we need to be careful whether we are being obedient to man, or obedient to GOD!

everlastinglife wrote:

With this aside, I have no link to any denomination or man made religion. I would say brother fasting is obedience to God, not a structured event that a particular set of rules or man puts forth at a particular time. Now if a group gets together and needs answers, needs deliverance and decides to fast that is a powerful tool to speak to our Father. Simply we need to be careful whether we are being obedient to man, or obedient to GOD!

MY BROTHER,

YES, i believe, as you do, that fasting must be in obedience to God and not to man--which was my original quandary leading to my OP. i have since felt led to participate in the fast and feel blessed in doing so. Four days in i continue to feel God's will being done through the fasting and prayer--a personal cleansing coupled with intercessory prayer for our sick and dying nation.

As you may or may not know, Orthodox are called to four major fasts per year, and i have always been blessed by participating in them due to the cleansing and focusing power fast have. Follow the Church "rules" in this regard has never seemed burdensome or "legalistic" in that i believe the fasts were ordained by God--even though "administered" through Church canons. For me, with my problems with pride and tendencies toward arrogance, obedience is a good thing for sure!

This fast, however, presents as different in that it is more "elective" if i can use that term than participated in as an act of obedience. i am eager to see the outcome!

IN CHRIST,
ephraim

IN CHRIST,
ephraim