Fasting: A Way of Justice

The season of Lent is as sacred and life-giving as any person of faith seeks it to be. Of course, our hunger for God, and a meaningful living of God's truth and love, is an ongoing unending passage on our way to the kingdom....

When we take the time to consider what's going on, we need reassurance, trust, hope. The world is going insane with unending violence, spreading hunger, and horrifying health conditions. Our society is rudderless as it rushes ahead with little guidance or direction. Does any of this pertain to faith, to our Lenten experience? I believe it does.

The Word of God offers a banquet for our hunger. Do we bother to savor and digest it? Or do we gulp it down uselessly? We have a choice: I offer some thoughts for your consideration.

We know the story of Jesus' fasting and the temptations He experienced afterwards. Why did Jesus fast? He needed to strengthen His resolve and prepare for the demands He would face. In those 40 days of fasting, Jesus was impassioned with a hunger to love unconditionally, faithfully, everyone. He was moved to a pure, absolute sense of justice which could resist all evil and absorb all rejections. His hunger was satiated by a compassion beyond understanding, a generosity of self open to all unquestioned. He needed all this: He would not have accepted His passion and death if He hadn't. Lastly, He is the Word of God ever inviting, teaching, convincing. His example is an invitation to do likewise.

Fasting takes on a different meaning when God describes it; it has nothing to do with food and drink. God says true fasting is a fast from selfishness, arrogance, self-righteousness, greed, power, control, refusals to forgive, heal, reconcile and, in our day, a fasting from waste and abusing resources. It is summed up by a call to justice: "True fasting is freeing the oppressed, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and sheltering the homeless...."

"Fasting: A Way of Justice" -- by Mark Franceschini, OSM from a March 2007 letter. Used with permission.