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
if you accepted your conditioning to passivity and submission.
and lie in sackcloth and ashes, as if you believed what you have been taught
about your worthlessness to Church and society?
Do you call this a fast?
Is this the kind of behavior you think I want of you
to 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,
Church and world as a way of releasing those bound unjustly......
That you untie the thongs of patriarchy that have bound
your bodies and your imaginations......
That you set free your own potential as women knowing that
you cannot set free other oppressed persons unless you do......
That you work for breakthroughs in the yokes that prevent dialogue,
reconciliation, and peacemaking.

I want you to share your bread with the hungry,
but also ask and help others to ask about
the reasons for the hungry......
I want you to shelter the oppressed and the homeless
but also ask and help others to ask about
the reasons for homelessness and oppression.
I want you to clothe the naked
but also to ask and help others to ask about
the inequities that exist among the members
of our human family.
I want you to imagine and to move toward new futures
without turning your backs on those who
cannot follow or imagine as quickly as you can.

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