Lenten Fasting

Last year, an article about the Pope and the season of Lent managed to make its way onto Time magazine, attracting the attention of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Making its rounds again this year as well, “Pope Francis’ Guide to Lent: What You Should Give Up This Year” is a delightful mix of clickbait and a genuine Christian call to action. The article’s author, Christopher Hale, references and builds off of several of the Pope’s Ash Wednesday messages, concluding that “if we are going to fast from anything this Lent, Francis suggests that even more than candy or alcohol, we fast from indifference to others.”

That Pope Francis focuses on the vice of indifference to others will not be surprising to those who have followed his headlines in the popular media. The care of the poor takes center stage in many of Pope Francis’ messages and sermons, exacerbated by what he observes as an indifference or apathy to the suffering of the poor. Pope Francis groups this indifference with hatred and hardness of heart as sins that Jesus’s death and resurrection have already overcome. Thus, Pope Francis urges us to ask God to form our hearts in the likeness of Jesus’: open and attentive to the needs and sufferings of our neighbors as well as of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

The candy and alcohol, on the other hand, is a reference to the practice of fasting or “giving up for Lent” something that we regularly partake in, as a way of remembering and taking part in Jesus’s forty days in the desert. While American Protestants are used to this practice being up to the individual’s discernment (for example, it’d make more sense in my context to give up candy than alcohol, though both options are suspect), in many older Catholic contexts the fast was primarily a communal one, where entire parishes would go without meat for forty days.

The article ends with this rousing quote on the relative unimportance of these bodily fasts:

“What are you giving up for Lent?” It’s a question a lot of people will get these next few days. If you want to change your body, perhaps alcohol and candy is the way to go. But if you want to change your heart, a harder fast is needed. This narrow road is gritty, but it isn’t sterile. It will make room in ourselves to experience a love that can make us whole and set us free.

Now that’s something worth fasting for.

This and other recent pushbacks against Lenten fasting have been mostly confusing to me. I get that there have been cringeworthy instances of people sacrificing some trivial aspect of their lives, and feeling self righteous as a result. There have even been some instances of “secular” Lenten fasting, made in the name of health or psychological benefits. Maybe it’s for those reasons that there is a felt need to move fasting out of the realm of the physical and into the spiritual. Perhaps we no longer trust that Lenten fasting will do the work that we have traditionally assigned it to.

But nowhere does Pope Francis “recommend” that you fast from something that isn’t bodily. He warns against overly formal fasts that serve only to leave us self satisfied, while our selfishness and ignorance of the poor grow. He argues that fasting only makes sense if it “chips away at our security and, as a consequence, benefits someone else”. That is, our fasting must change us in a way that wears down the barriers that prevent us from doing good to others. But from scouring his recent Lenten messages, I found precious little to make anything close to a “guide” for what to fast from.

What the article’s author seems to miss is that Lenten fasting has never been about the thing your fasting from. Rather it is about the deprivation of its enjoyment, feeling its hunger pangs, and using that to help Christians better order their desires. “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Pleasures like eating meat and watching Netflix, which are good in their own respects, are delayed to help us see what we are normally blind to: the plight of the poor, our indifference to God and to others, and, particularly for Lent, Christ’s sufferings on his journey to the cross.

So when I hear someone mention that they are fasting from road rage or judging others, I fear that they’ve gotten some things backwards. Fasting from pleasures and repenting of sins (like the sin of indifference) are related, but something is lost if we conflate the two. Hence the particular format of Lenten fasting: we fast during the week, and on Sundays we “feast”, acknowledging that at the table we catch a glimpse of the Bridegroom’s feast, where fasting is made irrelevant (Mark 4:4). Sin that we are turning from, on the other hand, is not “picked up” again on Sundays or at Easter, like we do with fasting. To sum it all up, we might fast from alcohol, but we repent of alcoholism.

Let us not shy away from the important ways that disciplining our bodies has on the formation of our hearts this Lenten season. As Christ was not above the bodily practice of fasting and abstinence, may we too look to him for encouragement, trusting that our need for daily renewal and repentance will be supplied with grace by our Father in heaven.