This evening, I finished up all the food I couldn’t eat starting tomorrow — hence the oddball combination of buttered toast, white wine and merangues. Someday I hope to be a completely wonderful person who doesn’t cave at all to the spirit of Mardi Gras, who lets Cheesefare Sunday come and go without casting a panicky look around for all the foods that I didn’t care about last month but will miss terribly tomorrow.

You’d think I’d know better. It doesn’t really help — in fact, it might make things harder. But oh well. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last 20 years or so, it’s that you don’t have to show off when it comes to the Lenten fast. You don’t have to add additional regulations of your own design just to exhibit some kind of ascetic acrobatics. Just taking the rules as they’re given will make it hard enough if you really apply them — what you might call “mere fasting.”

I had been trying to figure out my rules for this year, but I think I’ll leave it at that. Remember the spirit of the fast, stop looking for loopholes or ignoring the obvious hypocrisy of eating allowable foods till I’m stuffed, remember that the best fast or the worst is still just a means to an end, not an end in itself. And look constantly for ways to live it out more fully. If I can get close to just that, it will be enough, I think.

***

Follow-up: A reading from “The Path to Salvation” by St. Theophan the Recluse offered additional insight:

But we must remember that all the fruits of these labors come from the spirit of zeal and quest. It conducts the renewing power of grace through these activities and brings down life into the soul. Without it, all these activities are empty, cold, lifeless and dry. Reading, prostrations, services and everything else are unfruitful when there is no inner spirit. They can teach vainglory and pharisaism, which become its sole support. This is why someone who has no spirit falls away when he meets with any opposition. Why, they themselves are a torture.

I’m not sure I understand that last sentence, but it doesn’t sound good.