Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

My reflection today is a little on the longer side, but I hope you'll hang in there!

In exactly seven days, we’ll find ourselves in Lent. (Wow!) Which means that now is a perfect time to consider what your Lenten discipline might be. Now…some folks are very adamant about fasting. Some folks are very adamant about not fasting and about assuming an additional spiritual discipline for Lent (taking on a prayer practice, holy reading, volunteering, etc.). The Anglican Way being the sort of "both/and" way that it is, there's no need to feel that one discipline is in competition with another, so why not consider both?

For now, though, let's consider fasting.

Technically speaking, the only fast that's truly necessary is that we fast from sin...which fast is impossible to practice without grace. Moreover, leading a godly life isn't a matter of avoiding bad stuff or of willing ourselves into godliness, but of allowing God to will God's goodness in us so that our lives conform to God's own Life, so that we actively do God's love in the world because God is doing God's love in and through us. This is part of what Jesus is getting at today in our Gospel reading today when he speaks of the relationship between adultery and lustful thoughts: righteousness isn’t just a matter of avoiding the actual committing of a sin—if our inner disposition is toward lust and we actively objectify and instrumentalize others in our thoughts, we can’t really claim to be righteous.

Now before we go too much further, let’s be clear: fasting from food or from some pleasure or some vice won't save our souls: only God can do that! What fasting can do, though, is to make us more conscious of patterns of being or behaving or consuming or using our freedom or our bodies that we may come to realize are unhealthy and not worth engaging in any longer. Fasting as a spiritual discipline is a way of becoming conscious of how our inner and outer lives don’t comport with each other, of how we hunger for the wrong things and are too often merely satisfied with what’s not good for us. Even so, while this consciousness is often a positive upshot of fasting, that's not necessarily why we might want to consider it as a discipline in Lent. (And speaking of considering fasting in Lent or at any other time: fasting may not be very helpful to someone who is struggling with an eating disorder, nor, in our hyper body-conscious culture, may it be helpful to someone to get the impression that fasting is the church’s imprimatur on this culture's destructive body-consciousness.)

So all that having been said...why fast? Why might fasting be important?

Well, to start: a fast is not actually a private sort of personal thing. Nor is it a public thing in a performative sense. It’s not even really about limiting our intake of food. It's about practicing an emptiness of will so that we can actually make room for and welcome God's saving will in us by engaging in the observance of a discrete rule. This is, in part, why it's preferable to observe the church's rules regarding fasting and abstinence than to choose your own fast. Why? Because the church's rules aren't rules you would choose. They existed before you and will exist after you. They're not beholden to you and they lead beyond you. The rule unsettles us by taking us outside ourselves, encouraging us to yield no longer to the familiar tyranny of self, but to follow a rule that’s precisely NOT of our own making and that we did not simply choose Similarly, determining together as a family what your collective fast might be, or deciding with a group of friends what your fast might be serves a parallel purpose--somewhere in there, you'll be required to fast from something you wouldn't choose to fast from, but you'll take up the fast on account of your love and support for your family and/or friends! By following the church's rule, a community's rule, we submit ourselves to a communal discipline by which we might more easily discover ourselves shaped by and in community, by and in the mutual responsibilities that inform loving relationship.

For those of you interested in the church's rule regarding fasting and abstinence in Lent, here it is, and I commend it to you (lightly adapted from an old edition of the Saint Augustine's Prayer Book)!

1--Mondays through Saturdays in Lent, eating not more than a light breakfast, one full meal, and one half meal. Sundays are not days on which the fast is kept as every Sunday is a feast of the Resurrection(!);
2--Abstaining from all flesh meat on Fridays in Lent (fish is considered okay, however);
3--The very young, the elderly, the ill, and those who engage in heavy physical labor are excused/exempt from fasting;
4--Stricter fasts are not at all recommended without consultation with a spiritual director and (in some cases) a medical professional.

Needless to say, to fast without a consciousness of (or without a desire for a greater apprehension of) what it might mean to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8), is perhaps one of the least edifying things one could do. But the discipline of the fast may help us more keenly desire and yearn for the justice of God that will drive us to seek opportunities to “do all such good works as [God] has prepared for us to walk in” (BCP 339).

I pray that we may all observe together a holy Lent!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+