Day Twenty-Five | March 22 TWENTY-FIVE

Fasting

Ijust needed a gallon of milk. That’s all. But I had committed the cardinal error of grocery shopping: I had gone to the store hungry. Nearly a hundred dollars later, I was leaving the store with pizzas and chips and yogurts and cheese. My hunger got the best of me. And I don’t think that I’m alone, for it’s a battle that most of us are unprepared to fight … much less to win.

That’s why, from the earliest days of the Church, fasting has been one of the most important – but most taxing – disciplines. To go without food (or other conveniences), to deny oneself, to join in the su ering of the poor and needy, to share in the pain of the cross – there is something powerful, something purifying that happens when we abstain from those things we tend to take for granted. In our lessness, we get to experience God’s muchness. Unfortunately, this critical practice of the faith has now fallen into the bygone ways of the saints for lack of use. Or maybe it’s deeper. Maybe it is that we, “Almost Christians” (as John Wesley put it), have forgotten the power and the necessity of going without for fear of missing out. Maybe we fear the hunger. Maybe we fear the pain. Maybe we fear what might happen if we discover that life really is simpler, better with less.

And it’s strange: how God, the Giver of all good things, sustains us: how He meets us in our hunger and wants to supply what is lacking, how He proves to us that “enough” is far less than what we think we need. It’s more of Him. It’s less of us. That’s the heart of fasting: it’s the cry of a heart that’s homesick for heaven.

But that’s a hard proposition for we lovers of things. We love our food. We love our technology. We love our chocolate. We love our co ee and tobacco and wine. We love our negativity and our excuses. We love our gossip and our lies, and we love the way that we have neatly packaged all of it into these lives we “Almost Christians” are almost living. For many, it’s almost enough.

Almost.

For we have let all our nibbling on the world’s emptiness ruin our appetite for God’s fullness … and emptiness will never sustain us. Gluttons in a world of beggars, we have feasted at the tables of want and greed and power, and we have forgotten the whispered invitation to Christ’s table – a table set, not with the golden chargers of royalty, but with the meager plates of the poor. It is a humble meal for common folks; it’s our Host that makes the table so special. And, if we are honest, we must confess that we are starving – starving for what the world is incapable of feeding us.

It is Lent, then, that calls us to sit and to feast on fasting. It’s a mystery to be sure: this season when we discover that less is oftentimes more, when we discover that mental and spiritual sacrifice is just as important as material sacrifice – if not more so. It is during these days that we discover that our true hunger is not one of the belly but one of the soul – a hunger that only Jesus can fill.