Last February, I left Queensland and made a trip south to Sydney and Melbourne. That was the first time I had ventured out of the State since the COVID lockdown. I was interested in having a face-to-face meeting with my confreres whom I had only seen on Zoom over the past three years.
While in Melbourne, at one of the liturgies in the Columban House, John Hishon, a confrere from the 1970s when we both worked together in the Pagadian Diocese in the Southern Philippines, gave the homily. Ash Wednesday was approaching, and he presented Pope Francis’ words about what fasting might look like in the period of Lent. It made a lot of sense to me.
In our Australian Society these days, the only fasting we hear about has to do with health and well-being. There are endless tomes in the book shops, web pages on the internet, and podcasts on the radio about what will help us to maintain a healthy body weight and give us a clear complexion. It promises to bring about the body-beautiful. There seems to be little understanding of the spiritual benefits of fasting, where there is a motivation to bring the body into subjection and to “go against” bodily appetites.
In the quotes above, Pope Francis is trying to get to the heart of what fasting is all about. His ideas are not new in our tradition. Isaias, a very long time ago, also had similar thoughts:
“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?" (Isaias 58, 6-7)
The essence of true religion and its various practices is that God asks us to live justly, to change the world, and to make it a better place. We are to renew our own hearts and to be compassionate. Formalism in religion, without the fruit of true worship, is meaningless. We need to be doers of the word and prepare ourselves for action to change the world into a model of what the reign of God looks like.
So, where does this leave the discipline of bodily fasting? The Pope seems to play it down, and even the ancient Prophet Isaias pointed out what the fruit of true religion should be. Fasting is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end.
However, it seems to me that we cannot turn our back on the ancient disciplines of prayer and fasting. Indeed, when the disciples returned from going out two by two to preach and to heal, they wondered why, in some instances, they couldn’t do the works of mercy – that the devils didn’t obey them and they couldn’t heal some people. Jesus’ response was that this type of evil can only be overcome with prayer and fasting (Mark 9:29). This discipline of prayer and fasting is now a part of our tradition, but the practice has always been for an end in view that is beyond itself.
Let us practice true religion. Let us discipline ourselves by prayer and fasting in order to recreate our world into the image that God wants.
Columban Fr Warren Kinne lives and works on the Gold Coast.
Related links
- Read more from the current Columban eBulletin.
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