Late one night in December, between Christmas and New Year, I was sitting in my favorite armchair with a cup of tea enjoying the Christmas tree lights and thumbing through the journal that I use to review the past year and set a direction for new year. I had mostly finished the actual goal-setting process and was just enjoying the quiet time to remember and reflect when this peaceful moment was rudely interrupted by a thought that burst into my head in classic comic book style. Somehow, in all of the pages upon pages of journal prompts that I had answered, the theme of weight loss or dieting had never come up! And this happened despite the fact that when I shuffle through the clothes in my closet every morning there are several pair of pants that I can not bring myself to squeeze into! “How,” I asked myself, “has it come about that a 25 pound weight loss was NOT one of my major goals for the year?”
The answer to that question was pretty obvious, once the question was formulated, but the answer may surprise you as much as it surprised me:
I had been following the liturgical calendar.
What is the liturgical calendar?
The liturgical calendar is a way that some churches organize the year into three types of seasons and days: feasts, fasts, and ordinary time. Advent and Lent are seasons of repentance, preparation and fasting. The seasons of Christmas and Easter are the longer seasons of celebrations and feasting. Most of the days of the year are are neither feasting or fasting; they are ordinary.
As we go through the year and progress through the various seasons many things change: the daily bible readings, the decorations of the church, the hymns and prayers, and the food that we eat. Chene Heady, in an article about the liturgical calendar says that, “[i]f we will allow it, the liturgical calendar will shape us at a level deeper and more fundamental than consciousness itself…[m]any holy men and women through the ages… have set their internal clock to the liturgical calendar and have found their lives reshaped in the process — for the purpose of the liturgical calendar is to orient our days around the person of Jesus.” I didn’t know all of that when I began, but evidently reorientation is what had happened to me. Without realizing it I had started viewing food through the context of the liturgical calendar.
But Why Did The Liturgical Calendar Change How I Viewed Weight Loss?
When I started to observe the liturgical seasons, I unknowingly stepped into and operated under an entirely different paradigm about food. After living that way for several years, even very imperfectly, my instincts about food changed. Then, when I was faced with an event that I had face before and saw that I instinctively reacted to it quite differently than I would have ten years before, I realized that my thinking about food had fundamentally changed. To me the craziest thing was that I never realized that I was operating under a particular paradigm. It wasn’t until that week in late December that I realized that I was mentally in a completely different space and that I could now look objectively at the problem of my weight gain and at the weight loss/health food culture under which I had formerly operated. Here then are three big aha moments that I hope will be helpful to you.
Three Ways the Liturgical Calendar Changed How I Think About Food
- Food became part of worship. Our culture tells us that food is about us. We choose what we eat because of our desire to affect our body – to decrease or increase our size, to improve our health, to increase our energy or to give us comfort. Those are not necessarily bad motivations, but the focus is on us. The effect of this self-focus is that food and all issues related to it loom large in our minds. Food becomes a source of anxiety.
When I choose my food based on the liturgical calendar, the focus shifts. Now food has an object outside myself – Jesus; it becomes part of how I worship. Food also becomes a smaller concern. It is only one of the many ways that I can worship and there is much flexibility in how I use food in that worship. St. Augustine defines virtue as loving things with the kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. I feel like the liturgical calendar is moving me towards virtue by properly ordering my affections for food.
- I realized that food is not evil. Our health food culture also tells us that some foods are “good” and some are “bad” and these assertions are so common that it’s easy to write them off as unharmful. Sugar is obviously, bad, right? But in the course of the liturgical year, there are no foods that are completely off limits. During feast times we feast and during fasts we fast. Most days we just eat foods that will nourish our body so that we can do the work that God has given us. It was this difference in perspective that clued me into to another way that the liturgy points us back to Christ.
In Genesis 1:11 we read that God created “seed-bearing plants and trees that bear fruit with seed in it. In the next verse he declares that this plants are good and in verse 29 he gives these plants to us for food. Later on in Genesis he gives us the animal foods. In Acts, Jesus speaks to Peter and removes the restrictions on foods that were impure under the Jewish law. These are just a few of the examples in Scripture in which God demonstrates that is is His prerogative to decide which foods we may eat. If we let someone other than God dictate what foods are Good and Bad, then we are letting them be God to us. By adjusting our eating to the seasons of the church year, we bring our hearts and minds and body back under the Lordship of Christ.
- I am no longer good or bad based on what I eat. Another reason that food is anxiety inducing subject is that by subscribing to our culture’s definition of which foods are good and bad we place ourselves under a law. The problem with that is that this law only condemns; it does not offer a path of atonement or justification. If we believe that sugar, or chocolate or wheat is bad and then we eat that thing, then we become bad. We don’t consciously think about it that way, but I think it does actually create quite a lot of psychological stress. Conversely, if I view all of my eating as part of the service and worship that I render to God, then I do have a path back If I actually commit a sin. If I commit gluttony, then I can confess that, along with the emotional sin that probably went along with it, repent and then receive grace to go forward without sinning.
What This Means For You and Me
You may be wondering what I am going to do about this 25 pound weight gain, since it didn’t even make it onto my goals for this year. My plan is to deal with this in the context of daily life, as I continue to follow the rhythm of feasts and fast and ordinary days. It will not be easy; I know even my ordinary days will be heavily skewed towards what would be a fast for others. And my feast day foods will require some tweaking. But most of the time it seems like something that is doable. It’s not inducing panic, and that’s actually a pretty huge deal!
For you, I hope that this article may give you some hope that there is a simple way to escape from the feelings of anxiety and panic and shame that our health food culture inadvertently creates.
Mary Frances Pickett writes about food and faith and particularly how to get your family to eat vegetables. If you’d like to read more of her writing, she publishes article weekly by email and you can click here to get next weeks.