Editor Scott Coleman wants to know what the Christmas Season means to me. The best way I can express that is by telling you what I’m going to be doing on the morning of Wednesday, December 26.
Like all Orthodox priests, I go to work on Christmas Day, but on the Day After Christmas, I get up while everyone else is still asleep. I go into the kitchen; I fire up the oven and one of the burners on the stove; I pull a cookie sheet and a frying pan out of the cabinets, then I reach into the refrigerator and get a pound of thick-sliced, super-smoked applewood-seasoned bacon, a tube of those ready-made biscuits, and a big tub of butter.
I then spend the next forty-five minutes or so frying up the bacon (it has to be that perfect combination of chewy and charred) and baking the biscuits (which have to be just barely crisp on the outside and still soft on the inside). By the time I’m done, the noise and the smell have awakened everyone else in the house, and we all sit down and enjoy The Three B’s—Bacon and Biscuits and The Beverage of Your Choice.
Which may not seem like a big deal at all, but, remember, we’re Orthodox Christians: so by December 26th, we will not have eaten a breakfast like that since November 15. And that forty days worth of fasting makes the most ordinary meals into extraordinary events.
Of course, that’s also the whole message of Christmas: The Eternal Son of God the Father has become the man Christ Jesus. And because our Lord and Master has become one of us, everything—even something as simple and plain as The Triple B’s—has been transformed and made radiant with the glory of Heaven.
In Holy Orthodoxy, fasting is just one thing that helps us perceive that glory. If you’d like to know more about how this world is being transformed, if you’d like to experience that heavenly radiance all year, just send me a note or give me a call. I’d love to talk with you.