After the Fast: A Word from St. John Chrysostom

Beloved, even if the fasting is over, let the piety remain.  Even if the time of the holy quarantine [forty-day fast] is gone by, let us not put aside the memory of it.  Let no one feel displeasure at this exhortation; for I do not say it to impose on you another period of fasting, but because I wish you both to relax and to display now a more exact kind of fasting--but the true one.  For it is possible for one who is not fasting to fast.  How is this?  I shall tell you.  While on the one hand we are taking food, let us, on the other, abstain from sin.  For this is the fasting which helps us, and it is with this fasting in view that we abstain from food, so that we may more easily run in the course of virtue.  Therefore, if we wish both to take proper care of the body and to keep the soul free from sin, let us take heed and act accordingly.

This manner of fasting will be easier for us.  Regarding the other kind, I mean abstaining from food, I used to hear many a man say he found it difficult to endure the burden of want of food, and blame the weakness of his body, and utter many other bitter laments, saying that his health was being ruined because he had to go without a bath and had to confine his drinking to water.  No such excuse is possible with regard to the fasting from sin.  It is  possible to enjoy all these things and to supply the corresponding service to the body, and also to take proper care of the soul.  In fact, I am not urging you now to abstain from any of these things.  Keep away only from sin and show yourself constantly faithful to that abstinence.  In this way you will be able at every period of your life, to practice the true fasting.  There is nothing to stop you from enjoying in moderation the things I enumerated; but sin in every form is forbidden.  Sin, however, is born precisely from such sources as wantonness, gluttony, and too much sloth.  Therefore, I exhort, since we know clearly that these are wrong, let us not use what is wrong on the pretext that we are relaxing.  

I shall now say again what I have often said before: just as the moderate use of food greatly benefits both the health of the body and the condition of the soul, so, on the other hand, the abuse of food corrupts the whole man, body and soul.  Excess in eating and drinking weakens the strength of the body and destroys the health of the soul.  Let us, consequently, flee excess and not become careless in what concerns our own salvation; since we know that excess is the root of all evil, let us be careful to cut it out.  Every shape of sin springs forth from wantonness as from its source.  These vices make us slip into sin the way fuel makes a fire burn.  In the case of fire, an abundance  of fuel builds a bigger fire and lifts the flames on high.  So too here, if we abandon ourselves to luxury and drunkenness, we enlarge the burning pyre of our sins.

SOURCE:

St. John Chrysostom, St. John Chrysostom: Baptismal Instructions, "The Fifth Instruction," (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1963), pp. 80-81.