In 2019, during my road trip across the United States, I visited restaurants all across the country. I noticed that the more gay flags a restaurant had, the tastier its food. How could it be that those who supported the awful act of sodomy make food that I liked the most? The answer is that they had dedicated their lives to carnal pleasures (food included) and had become worldly experts at it in a way that a devout Christian, who eagerly seeks divine pleasure, had not.
That which you treasure is where your heart is (Matthew 6:21). As a carnal man for most of my life, food was one of my greatest joys. While living in Poznan, Poland, my Friday night tradition was going to Fat Bob Burger near the town square for a burger feast to satisfy my belly before hitting dens of iniquity to satisfy my lusts. My burger meal selection was optimized after carefully testing most of the menu items to identify that which yielded me the most pleasure. I would savor every bite of my peanut butter bacon burger as an appetizer for additional pleasures I sought thereafter. With no faith in God, this meal was like a holy sacrament, the peak of my existence where I experienced deep communion with my false gods.
The foundation of the passions is the flesh; when the flesh is emaciated, then it is as if the passions are undermined and their fortress is destroyed. Without fasting, overcoming the passions would be a miracle, similar to being in a fire and not being burned. How can he who profusely satisfies his flesh with food, sleep, and rest keep anything spiritual in his mind and in his intentions? —Saint Theophan the Recluse in Thoughts for Each Day of the Year
You will become a connoisseur of the world if all you have is the world. If you are a homosexual restauranteur and your entire life is centered around maximizing pleasure with great zeal, you will open a restaurant that easily satisfies the crowd and gets glowing reviews on Yelp. However, if you are an Orthodox Christian restauranteur who fasts for much of the year, and specializes in dishes that don’t feed one’s passions, your culinary creations will be suitable but forgettable, not nearly titillating enough for a line to form out the front door. The homosexual’s tasty dishes are the culmination of his passions while the Christian’s dishes are mere fuel for his real passion of following Lord Jesus Christ in truth and spirit.
When you’re in the prime of your life, with no health, family, or money problems, you may be very well deceived that all you need is to drink and be merry, that the homosexual establishments in the city are like icing on the buttery rich yellow cake of a well-lived life, but don’t be fooled: behind a pleasing material reality is Satan heaping up your soul in sin to throw it down into hell upon your death, and the memories of such pleasantries will be of no aid to you in the next life. Like the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), we should not aim for the good things in this life, for by doing so we surely neglect worship of our Lord or forget Him entirely.
“Whenever you see a man living in wickedness, and enjoying great prosperity, and suffering no calamity, on this account lament for him the more, because, being under the power of disease and grievous corruption, he increases his own weakness, becoming worse by luxury and indolence.” —Saint John Chrysostom in On Wealth And Poverty
Let us be satisfied with gruel and slop if they are placed before us. Let us shed the skin of the carnal man and not desire to please our temporal taste buds. Let us not trust the offerings of homosexuals and degenerates to give us pleasures of this world. This is easier said than done, and my carnal skin is attached firmly due to decades of seeking worldly pleasures, but I know that food will not save me, nor anything else that the homosexual in spirit can provide, and if I do seek out those things more than Lord Jesus Christ himself, I must not gnash my teeth when I fail judgment on the Last Day.
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