In our well-fed society, Lent is the time we are urged to fast from everything but food. The problem with this is that it breaks the intrinsic connection between the three fundamental spiritual disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Why go hungry when you can work hard at not dropping the f-bomb, or watch less TV, or give up chocolate, or alcohol, or whatever?
It may well be the case that you could stand to watch less TV, clean up your language, eat less chocolate, or drink fewer alcoholic beverages. Maybe abstaining from these things during Lent is something you prayerfully discern you should do. Be careful! Lent is not the time when you try to make yourself uncomfortable in some fiddling but irritating way.
Traditionally, fasting referred to foregoing food and drink for religious purposes. Hence, fasting is not dieting, though, for those whose health permits them to fast in an extended manner, there are health benefits that come from fasting. The detox your body undergoes during periods of extended fasting is most conducive to prayer, meditation, and contemplation.
In his Letter to the Philippians, about those he dubs “enemies of the cross of Christ,” Saint Paul states “Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their ‘shame.’ Their minds are occupied with earthly things.”1 I take this to mean they live according to the pleasure principle.
By contrast, the apostle insists that Christians are people of hope, joyfully longing for Christ’s return, when he “will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.”2 Fasting is an act of hope because it is a powerful means of even now letting Christ Jesus subject you to himself.
Today, along with Good Friday, is a day of fasting and, if you must eat something, a day of abstinence. Hence, if you eat you do not eat the meat of warm-blooded animals. Such days do not require you to eat fish, let alone require you to prepare an elaborate seafood meal. A simple meal with no meat more than suffices.
Next week, between the First and Second Sundays of Lent, on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, you have the chance to observe Ember Days. While not as stringent as Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, these, too, are days of fasting and abstinence. Formerly obligatory, the observance of Ember Days, while encouraged, is now optional but, sadly, little observed.
Ember Days happen four times a year, seasonally. In spring, the first full week of Lent. In summer, the week between Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. Fall Ember days are observed the week after the Exaltation of the Cross. The week after the Feast of Saint Lucy is when winter’s Ember Days come around.
The practice of fasting during Lent and beyond, even if this just means skipping a few meals a week, eating less for your meals, preparing less and simpler food, or trying not to eat between meals, is basic: eat less and give more to the poor. Not only does fasting allow us to be in solidarity with those who daily lack what we take for granted, but it is also an act of penance, a way, by the grace of God, through the merits of Jesus Christ and all the saints, making right, in some small way, those things you did wrong.
Just as hope joins faith to charity, fasting links prayer to almsgiving. Prayer corresponds to the theological virtue of faith. When practiced by itself, prayer can turn you in on yourself. Almsgiving, which can either be giving money to those in need and/or sacrificial service to others, when done apart from a spirit of prayer and fasting, while certainly good, can easily become humanitarianism. In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI noted that caritas, or agape:
does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support. In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of [the human person]: the mistaken notion that [s/he] can live “by bread alone” (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3)—a conviction that demeans [women and men] and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human3Hope is the flower of faith and charity is their fruit. It is by practicing these spiritual disciplines that we become what Saint Paul urges us to be: “ambassadors of Christ.”4
Be careful, lest, like the Pharisees, you turn your practice of these disciplines into ends rather than the means they are intended to be. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are means to the end of loving God and neighbor ever more deeply. Desiring to love God and neighbor better is how you let Christ subject you to himself. Transforming as they do soul, body, and heart, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are means for the conversion we all need to undergo.
However, practicing these spiritual disciplines won’t bring you closer to God. Only God can bring you closer to Himself. What the practice of these fundamental spiritual disciplines, taught to us by Christ himself, is meant to do is to help you get yourself, your ego, out of the way so you are open to God’s grace.
My dear friends in Christ, Lent is not a time for programs of radical self-improvement. It is a time of grace. A time to open yourself more fully to God through the integrated practice of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We do this together in preparation for the renewal of our baptismal promises at the Great Easter Vigil and to prepare us for life eternal.
1 Philippians 3:18b-19.↩
2 Philippians 3:21.↩
3 Pope Benedict XVI. Encyclical Letter. Deus Caritas Est, sec. 28b.↩
4 2 Corinthians 5:20.↩
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