Fasting is still cool

WITH Ash Wednesday, we open again another season of Lent. It’s a yearly liturgical period that invites us all to prepare for the most important event in Church life—the Easter mystery, the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord.

For this year, Pope Benedict already has given out his Lenten message that focuses on the ascetical practice of fasting. I believe that it’s worthwhile to go through that message to savor fasting’s unfading relevance in our life.

It’s certainly a time-honored practice that has deep roots in the Bible and in Church tradition. Together with prayer and almsgiving, fasting is the usual pious tool to transform our heart, detaching it from itself so it can give itself totally to God and to others, as we are meant to be.

It’s a pity that this duty is fast disappearing in the minds of many people. It’s as if it’s already extinct, and the only remaining value it has is that of a relic of the past, fit for museums, but not anymore in our present environment.

We can never overemphasize the need for fasting. In fact, it should be an abiding practice, and not just a Lenten thing. Given our wounded human condition, fasting offers a continuing corrective to our ever unstable state of being.

Our tendency, constantly fed by our own weaknesses and the many, endless temptations around us, is to be self-absorbed, to such an extent that we don’t even realize we are in that kind of predicament.

We have to understand that this anomaly is highly toxic to us. We are meant to fill our mind and heart with God and others, with thoughts and desires of goodness for others in all its forms.

We slacken in this business, and we sooner or later get into trouble. Our own weaknesses start to dominate us, and the temptations around become irresistible.

Whatever power that we have, big or small, to keep a civil and decent appearance outside cannot last long. If we only live in our own world, with God and others practically considered as outsiders and strangers, there’s no other way for us to go but to perdition.

We have to be wary of the illusion of shutting God and others out of our mind. We can be thrilled by our own ideas and desires only, but sooner or later, without God and others, this bubble will explode, and we’ll exposed to the abject reality of our nothingness without God.

In his Lenten message, the Pope traces the origin and basis of fasting, and how it has developed since. I think it is a knowledge that plays a crucial role in our understanding and appreciation of fasting.

The Pope said that the original divine indication on fasting was when God told our first parents not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They can eat anything in Paradise, except that.

And the reason is quite simple—eating that fruit would lead our first parents and us to pursue our knowledge of good and evil independently of God. With it, we would start to build our own world. We’d become a Jabberwocky, someone who lives in fantasy land.

This is actually our underlying problem. Instead of filling ourselves with goodness, feeding our mind and will with the mind and will of God, we prefer to do things on our own.

God and the others—the two always go together as indicated in the original dual commandment of love God and neighbor—become at best a prop in our system, not its main substance.

We need to correct this irregularity. When we notice that we are sinking in our own world, we need to react immediately. And fasting is one way of correcting that tendency.

We have to follow Christ’s example. He said his food is no other than to do the will of His Father. This should always be our attitude, no matter how intoxicating our human progress can be.

These days, our fasting need not be only in food and drinks, but also in the use of the internet and other gadgets. From time to time, we need to deprive ourselves of them if only to recover our proper outlook that should be oriented towards God and others.

These gadgets are notorious for leading us to forget God as we immerse ourselves with the many earthly wonders they can give us.