“Today we are celebrating the day of the Beheading of John the Baptist… We are used to understanding the word “celebrate” as joy, but it also means “to remain idle,” and you can remain idle, because joy will overwhelm the soul and there is no longer any business to do, and maybe it happens because the hands dropped from grief or from horror. And this is today's holiday: what will you take up in the face of what we have heard today in the Gospel?
Therefore, on the day of the Beheading, a strict fast is provided, during which meat, dairy products, and fish are not eaten. “We will not be accomplices of Herod's gluttony,” says the Typicon. The charter explains how to properly treat this holiday:
“Shall we eat meat or other delicious food? But the Baptist lived in a waterless and grassless desert - he neither ate bread nor had any other food. Do we drink wine? And he did not drink wine or any other drink of the world. The earth was his table and bed, he ate only locusts (carob tree pods, according to other sources - a kind of edible locust) and wild honey. Instead of a bowl - a handful of water flowing from a stone. Therefore, let us spend this day in fasting and prayer.” - Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
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