Setting aside the terrible thing the prophet Samuel admonished King Saul for not doing in our first reading, the message of our readings today can nonetheless be found in Samuel’s words: “Obedience is better than sacrifice.”1 It’s often easier to do anything than the what the Lord asks.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola identified three approaches to following Christ: postponement, compromise, and freedom. What we have in King Saul is a compromiser. I will do God’s will insofar as it conforms to my own will and desires. This may be a worse disobedience than putting off God’s will altogether.
This brings us to our Gospel passage, taken from Mark. It is important to recognize that we are those from whom the bridegroom, Christ, has been taken. Of course, not only is he not absent but he’s powerfully present through the Holy Spirit, who is the mode of his presence until he returns. But Jesus is not with us in the same way he was with his companions during his earthly ministry.
Therefore, as Jesus’ disciples, we are to fast as well as pray and give alms. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are three fundamental spiritual disciplines of a Christian life. These are taught by our Lord himself. Fasting is what links prayers to almsgiving just as hope joins faith to love.
Of course, there are those for whom fasting is not recommended and may even be dangerous for serious physical reasons or due to age. We are not asked to compromise our physical health. In fact, Saint Ignatius who, in the immediate aftermath of his conversion observed a very strict regimen of fasting for a long time, later warned others and forbade his Jesuits from taking fasting to an extreme.
Fasting can be done either for a whole day, drinking only water and other light beverages or by skipping a meal or not eating between meals. Historically, what you don’t eat or, in our society, what you save by not eating, is given to the poor. Abstinence, which, in our Roman Catholic context, means not eating the meat of warm-blooded animals, has a hand-in-glove relationship with fasting.
For those of us who can fast (I think virtually all of us can do this in some small way), it is an important discipline, one to be practiced at a minimum twice a year: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We should also undertake to fast when the pope or our bishop calls for a day of fasting. Like any spiritual discipline, fasting in some form should be practiced regularly enough that it bears fruit.
Each Friday that is not a solemnity or in the octave of Christmas or Easter is still to be observed as a day of penance. Even now, the primary way we are supposed to observe Fridays as days of penance is by abstaining from meat. We do this not because eating meat is bad. Rather, it is because it is good, that is, enjoyable and permissible. Hence, we make a small sacrifice.
In his recent Wednesday catechesis series on vices and virtues, Pope Francis identified gluttony as the worst of the seven deadly sins. The Holy Father said, “Tell me how you eat, and I will tell you what kind of soul you possess. In the way we eat, we reveal our inner selves, our habits, our psychological attitudes.”2 Each of the seven deadly sins has a contrary virtue. Fasting is a practice that helps us to realize the virtue than runs contrary to gluttony- temperance, that is, moderation.
The practice of the spiritual disciplines is how we allow ourselves, open ourselves, to be conformed to the image of Christ. Yet, as James Kushiner, an Orthodox Christian noted: "A discipline won’t bring you closer to God. Only God can bring you closer to Himself. What the discipline is meant to do is to help you get yourself, your ego, out of the way so you are open to His grace."3 Getting back to Saint Ignatius' three approaches to doing God's will, the truly free person is the one who discerns God's will and does it.
Fasting amplifies prayer, thus enhancing our love of God, and, when practiced properly, results in almsgiving, which is love of neighbor.
1 1 Samuel 15:22.↩
2 Pope Francis. Wednesday General Audience, 10 January 2024.↩
3 James Kushiner. Mere Orthodoxy blog post during Lent many years ago.↩
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