Fasting is not a diet, and it is not a debt we pay. It is prayer offered with the body · a small, deliberate hunger that keeps the soul awake and turns it toward God. The Church fasts together, in the same seasons, so that no one is left to invent his own asceticism alone.
The Fathers are of one voice that the fast of the stomach means little without the fast of the tongue and the eyes, and that it is joined always to prayer and to almsgiving · what is spared from the table is meant for the poor. "When you fast," the Lord says, "do not look gloomy" · the fast is kept quietly, even cheerfully, never for show, never as a measure of one soul against another.