Just a thought

It’s funny how the four fasts emphasize fasting, probably because the popular definition of fasting revolves around food intake. We could call the four fasts ‘Lent,’ but that would only emphasize the sombre idea of ‘giving up’ something, because that term has been ‘pre-loaded’ with a millennium’s worth of sanctimonious baggage. But if the fasts, such as the current Theotokos Fast, emphasized not constricted food consumption, or the substitution of daily delights (the movies, going out for a drink, computer games) with rigorous prayer marathons, but instead, ‘serving one another with acts of love, of mercy, of benevolence,’ I wonder what we would do during these ‘holy’ seasons.