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Fr. Yousef Yacoub
4 July 2026
Copts fast for more than two hundred days a year — yet fasting is not hunger, and it is not a diet. It is freedom. We abstain from certain foods so that the body learns to obey the spirit, and the soul learns to feast on God.
Fasting of the Heart
St. John Chrysostom asks: what use is it for the stomach to fast while the tongue devours a brother? True fasting is fasting from gossip, from anger, from the scroll of endless distraction. The plate is only the training ground; the heart is the arena.
Fasting is also inseparable from mercy. The money not spent on meat belongs, the fathers say, to the poor. This is why our fasts always walk on two legs: prayer and almsgiving.
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”