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Reflections on Lenten Fasting, 2010 |
Fasting has always been an important part of our farm worker movement. We learned from Gandhi, and other spiritual leaders before him, the value of fasting for such personal purposes as preparation for a significant life event, atonement, and self-purification... We also learned from Gandhi that the value of fasting could be extended beyond the personal to the social: that a person who fasted and suffers for a much-needed societal change broader than his or her purposes could elicit from others the desire to share the suffering and thereby participate in eradicating a specific social injustice. ~ Cesar Chavez
Prayer for Fasting
All praise be yours, God our Creator,
As we wait in joyful hope
For the flowering of justice
And the fullness of peace.
All praise for this day.
By our weekly fasting and prayer,
Cast out the spirit of war, of fear and mistrust,
And make us grow hungry
For human kindness,
Thirsty for solidarity
With all the people of your dear earth.
May all our prayer, our fasting and our deed be done in the name of Jesus. Amen.
(Archdiocese of Chicago's Office for the Ministry of Peace and Justice)
A Reflection on Fasting
by Mary Collins, OSB
The New Testament’s answer to the questions, “Why should we fast?” is “As a sign of your love.” Fasting is not an end in itself. Love has to do with relationships, and fasting can lead us to a better understanding of our essential relationships with ourselves, with others, with the planet earth, and with God. Fasting and abstinence may well be a starting point for spiritual growth toward greater love among the well-fed congregations in this affluent society, protected by a bloated nuclear arsenal.
The New Testament does not guarantee a positive outcome for fasting. Fasting may make people self-righteous, doctrinaire, even contemptuous. Fasting can get sidetracked into dieting. A fast which will result in deepening love must begin in love and abide in it. Yet a loving decision to forego the joy of uncontrolled eating for a single day out of each seven can put us in touch immediately with our dependence on our own efforts; to fast may reveal that we do indeed live “by bread alone.” What then?
A time of fasting is a time of testing human readiness to wait on God. Do we trust that God lives, that God cares, that God loves and keeps the earth and all who live on it? Have we the humility to yield control to God? Fasting in faith can lead us more deeply into the mystery of God-with-us and God-in-us, and so restore human hope grown weary, love grown cold.
The New Testament regularly associates fasting and prayer and almsgiving. So does the U.S. bishop's peace pastoral. Both prayer and almsgiving move the center of our fasting beyond our preoccupation with ourselves toward a center of love. If we dare to discover hunger symbolically through a day of fasting each week, a further decision to complement that fast with almsgiving will force us to look around for hungry people.
A day of fasting and involvement with the hungry can draw us further into understanding the complexity of our social reality. We might become more curious about the fat defense budgets and their relationship to unemployment, underemployment, inflation, empty stomachs. We might get more interested in the chain of world food production, which keeps our supermarkets and tables loaded while keeping the world’s agricultural workers malnourished, feeding instead the workers’ resentment of us and our way of life.
This simple discipline, practiced and continually reflected on, can be a sign of our deepening conversion to the mystery of a love powerful enough to redeem the world.
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