A Conversation Between the Ascetic Father Makarios and Nikos Kazantzakis

In his autobiography Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis describes his forty day sojourn on Mount Athos in 1914 with the poet Angelos Sikelianos. There he met Father Makarios, an ascetic, with whom he engaged in discussions about faith and doubt. Kazantzakis, who was heavily influenced by Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson, would rail against the established Church, especially what he called its life-denying morality. Though he rejected the asceticism of Father Makarios, he respected his rejection of spiritual mediocrity. One conversation in particular went as follows:

Fasting and Science

For those interested in the scientific studies related to fasting and its health benefits, below are a few select links among many.

Fasting and Science

"Fasting Works Miracles"

Greek Orthodox Fasting Cleanses Body and Soul

The Health Benefits of Fasting

Does Intermittent Fasting Have Benefits? Science Suggests Yes

Lent in Narnia

Would C.S. Lewis have renounced Turkish Delight from Ash Wednesday to Easter?

Devin Brown
March 10, 2011
Christianity Today

In his short essay "Some Thoughts," C. S. Lewis examines the paradoxical fact that the Christian calendar is as full of feasts as it is fasts, as full of fasts as it is feasts.

How did the Christian faith come to have this unique "two-edged" character, a stance which is both world-affirming and world-denying? Lewis explains that on one hand "because God created the Natural — invented it out of His love and artistry — it demands our reverence." But at the same time, "because Nature, and especially human nature is fallen it must be corrected and the evil within it must be mortified."

But make no mistake, Lewis writes, its essence is good, and correction is "something quite different" from repudiation or Stoic superiority. And hence, Lewis argues, all true Christian asceticism will have "respect for the thing rejected" at its center. "Feasts are good," Lewis concludes, "though today we fast."

A Russian Child's Clean Monday Remembered

Ivan Shmelyov or Shmelev (1873-1950) was a Russian émigré writer best known for his full-blooded idyllic recreations of the pre-revolutionary past spent in the merchant district of Moscow. His first published story appeared in 1895; in the same year he visited Valaam Monastery, a trip that had a deep spiritual influence on him and resulted in his first book, Na skalakh Valaama ['On the Cliffs of Valaam'] (1897).

In his beloved book Anno Domini ['The Year of the Lord'], Shmelyov reminisces about the vanished traditional Russia of his childhood. In the excerpt below is the author's child's eye view of Clean Monday and the beginning of Great Lent in pre-revolutionary Moscow.