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The Fasting That I Wish
for You as Women

O Sisters in your ministries
Would that you might fast
so as to make your voices heard on this earth and in this Church.

Is this the manner of fasting that I wish of keeping a season of penance:
That you bow down your heads like reeds as
Spacerif you accepted your conditioning to passivity and submission.
and lie in sackcloth and ashes, as if you believed what you have been taught
Spacerabout your worthlessness to Church and society?
Do you call this a fast?
Is this the kind of behavior you think I want of you
Spacerto make you acceptable to me?

No! This, rather, is the fasting that I wish for you as women:
That you confront injustice in your communities,
SpacerChurch and world as a way of releasing those bound unjustly......
That you untie the thongs of patriarchy that have bound
Spaceryour bodies and your imaginations......
That you set free your own potential as women knowing that
Spaceryou cannot set free other oppressed persons unless you do......
That you work for breakthroughs in the yokes that prevent dialogue,
Spacerreconciliation, and peacemaking.Woman's Song graphic

I want you to share your bread with the hungry,
Spacerbut also ask and help others to ask about
Spacerthe reasons for the hungry......
I want you to shelter the oppressed and the homeless
Spacerbut also ask and help others to ask about
Spacerthe reasons for homelessness and oppression.
I want you to clothe the naked
Spacerbut also to ask and help others to ask about
Spacerthe inequities that exist among the members
Spacerof our human family.
I want you to imagine and to move toward new futures
Spacerwithout turning your backs on those who
Spacercannot follow or imagine as quickly as you can.

Then your light shall break like the dawn,
and your woundedness as women
Spacershall quickly be healed.
Your vindication shall go before you,
Spacerand my nurturing love will nourish you.

Then shall you call and I will answer,
you shall cry for help in giving birth to what is coming to be.
You shall cry for help and ask where I am in this wlhole struggle, and I will say
Here I am in the midst of it -- with you!

Acknowledgements
An adaptation of Isaiah 58:1-9 by Barbara Valuckas, SSND.
Published by the National Sisters Vocation Conference as a Lenten reflection in
Womans’s Song, 1986.
Woman's Song graphic: Mary M. Yanney