OUR LENTEN FAST
We are indebted to Monsignor Philip Whitmore, former Rector of the Venerable English College, for the Lenten Recollection he preached to the Order last Tuesday, in the presence of the Procurator of the Priory, Fra' Max Rumney, of the President, Chancellor and Vice-President of the British Association, and many knights and dames, in the Lady Chapel of St James's Spanish Place, by grace of the Rector.
For the benefit of those members of the Order unable to be present, the text is given below. We extend our prayers and commiserations to the two members of the British Association who had intended to make the Promise of Obedience that evening, but were unable due to having Covid. May they soon be fully recovered and pursue their religious conviction
The evening concluded with Sung Compline of the Little Office, for which we are grateful to Fr Stephen Morrison, OPraem, for his melifluous services as Hebdomadarius.
We would ask for the prayers, as a matter of obligation, of every member of our beloved Order tomorrow, the Feast of Saint Joseph, on which day senior members of our Order, including our Procurator, will be meeting the Holy Father to further discuss the ongoing reforms of the Order.
FASTING IN LENT
Monsignor Philip Whitmore
As we heard in the Gospel on the first Sunday of Lent,
Jesus was led by the Spirit through the wilderness, being tempted there by the devil for forty days. During that time he ate nothing and at the end he was hungry.
During Lent, we join Our Lord in his fast of forty days. I want to speak to you tonight about fasting. We’re asked, as you know, to include in our Lenten observance prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and of the three I think fasting is probably the one people find most difficult. Difficult, not only to do, but difficult even to understand why we do it. Of course it’s important for us to be able to explain the reasons why we Catholics do the things we do and why we believe the things we believe. “Always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you”, as we read in the first letter of Saint Peter. Because even if there are plenty of people today who find our faith baffling, you only have to scratch the surface to discover that most of them are searching for a way to make better sense of their lives. So there’s a great opportunity for us, and a great challenge, to find a way of getting our message across to people who are hungry for the truth. Obviously, the better we understand it ourselves, the better equipped we are to do that. So let’s focus this evening on the ancient practice of fasting, and try to see how it fits into the grand scheme of our faith and our spirituality. Our faith should touch us on every level of our being, and fasting obviously affects us right down there in the gut.
One reason why I think fasting is important is because it can help us focus on our need for God. When I’m hungry or thirsty, I quickly discover how fragile I am, how much I need to be sustained and supported by nourishment coming from outside myself. It’s a bit like being struck down by illness, or by an accident. Suddenly we lose a lot of our autonomy and it’s a great shock to the system to become dependent. When we’re fit and well, we’re used to being in control and it can be quite disturbing to lose some of that control. When I’m hungry, I’m forcibly reminded that I can’t survive for long without food and drink, gifts from God, gifts which in our affluent society we can easily take for granted, but which we shouldn’t take for granted. When my stomach starts nagging me about my food intake, then I can begin to understand the psalm which says, My body pines for you, like a dry weary land. Whether I realize it or not, I’m totally dependent on God all the time. He sustains me and supports me at every moment. And only He can satisfy my deepest longings, only He can fulfil my deepest needs. I need to remind myself of this, because it’s so easy to forget when life gets too comfortable. And history is full of examples of people forgetting. Let’s listen to a familiar passage from Chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis:
As people moved eastwards they found a valley in the land of Shinar where they settled. They said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire’. For stone they used bricks, and for mortar they used bitumen. ‘Come, they said, ‘let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we do not get scattered all over the world.’
Now the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built. ‘So they are all a single people with a single language’, he said. ‘This is only the start of their undertakings! Now nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they cannot understand one another.’ The Lord scattered them thence all over the world and they stopped building the city.
That story reminds us that ours is not the first generation to think it can manage without God. In this city, as in so many others, tall office blocks dwarf the churches which once dominated the skyline. Of course we may think this doesn’t apply to us. It’s our contemporaries who have forgotten all about God and who set about building a new Tower of Babel reaching to heaven. We know otherwise and our job is to proclaim the Gospel to them. Well, of course that’s true. But we’re probably more affected than we realize by the culture we live in, even if we think of ourselves as somewhat distinct from it. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that our generation is probably the first in history to have more or less given up on fasting. Perhaps we too need to remind ourselves how dependent we are on God, before we can get the message across to others.
So fasting reminds us of our hunger for God, our need for his loving care at every moment of our lives, not just the moments we set aside for him. I’m sure this is one of the reasons why the Church has always asked us to fast before receiving Holy Communion. At one time, as you know, we were required to fast from the previous midnight. Now the fast has been reduced to just one hour. There are lots of good reasons for this, of course. It means there are far more people receiving Communion at Sunday Mass. It means whole families attending a mid-morning or a late morning Mass can all receive Communion, having observed a decent interval since breakfast, whereas, at one time, there would have been very few people going forward for Communion at, say, a 10.30 Mass. And it means there can be evening Masses. But I think there’s a danger, even if we’re scrupulous about observing the fast, that it can become a rather mechanical exercise that doesn’t feel like fasting at all. Most of us can last an hour without feeling hungry. And surely the point of fasting is that we should feel hungry. If we attend Mass first thing in the morning, of course, the chances are we’ve been fasting from midnight anyway. But we might consider, as part of our Lenten observance, choosing to fast for more than an hour when we find ourselves attending Mass later in the day. There was a brief period, which I’m just young enough to have missed, when the fast before Communion was supposed to be three hours. You might like to try that occasionally. If we actually feel hungry at some point and choose not to eat until after Mass, our fast can serve as a reminder to us of just how much we need the spiritual nourishment we receive from the Eucharist.
Another reason for fasting is that it’s one of the ways we can give something to the Lord, to express our love for him. When we love someone, we always look for ways of showing it, by gifts, by words, by acts of love. Obviously, it’s quite difficult to do that when the one we love is Almighty God. What can you give to the God who has everything? As he says himself, With heaven my throne and earth my footstool, what house could you build me, what place could you make for my rest? Yet if we love him, we’ll feel driven to find a way of expressing our love. And prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, properly understood, are three excellent ways of doing that. I was saying just now that when we love someone we look for ways of showing it, by gifts, by words, by acts of love. When we pray, when we raise our hearts and minds to him, it’s like speaking words of love, whether or not we actually use words in our prayer. And when we give alms, it shouldn’t just be a way to ease our conscience about the poor, to make us feel better about ourselves and our more comfortable circumstances, we should be doing it because we recognize the face of Christ in those who suffer, so that in the practical help we give them we’re performing acts of love for Christ. And when we fast, we choose to deny ourselves for his sake, so that in effect we’re giving him something that costs us. If our motive is love, then prayer, fasting and almsgiving become easy. To some they may seem burdensome penitential practices, but if we perform them with love, we’ll suddenly find that His yoke is easy and his burden light.
I’ve an idea this approach might speak to some of our contemporaries who probably find the whole notion of fasting hard to swallow, if I can put it that way. I remember when I was an undergraduate, I used to get all sorts of rude comments when people saw me avoiding meat on Ash Wednesday. How ridiculous of the Catholic Church to make people do things like that. A typical intrusion into people’s private lives, not even letting them eat what they want. But I couldn’t help noticing a very different reaction when news reached us of a famine in Africa. There were pictures of starving children on everyone’s television sets. And suddenly everyone was offering to go on sponsored fasts so as to raise money for famine relief. The same people who thought it was stupid to have to abstain from meat twice a year were now abstaining from food altogether for 24 hours, because they could see a reason for it. They were moved to do it out of compassion for starving people. It’s amazing what people are prepared to do for love. And we might ask ourselves what we’re prepared to do for love of Our Lord. That’s all very well, I hear you say. At least the sponsored fast raised money for famine relief, so it makes sense to think of it as a gift. What sort of a gift is it to fast for the Lord? Here I think we can usefully reflect on a particularly challenging Gospel story.
He sat down in the treasury and watched the people putting money into the treasury, and many of the rich put in a great deal. A poor widow came and put in two small coins, the equivalent of a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, ‘In truth I tell you, this poor widow has put more in than all who have contributed to the treasury; for they have all put in money they could spare but she in her poverty has put in everything she possessed, all she had to live on.’
One of the things I find intriguing about that Gospel story is that the widow’s offering can’t possibly have been much use as a gift, yet it was obviously pleasing to the Lord, because of what it cost her to make it, because of the generous self-giving love that it expressed. So if our fasting costs us, and if we offer it to the Lord in a spirit of generous self-giving love, we can be sure that our gift will be pleasing to him, however small it may seem in itself.
While we’re on the subject of almsgiving, I think it’s worth mentioning how fasting and almsgiving can be usefully combined. That’s the point of last Friday’s Lent Fast Day, an opportunity to donate to charity the money we’ve saved on food. There’s certainly a long tradition behind that approach. It’s a good way of introducing the idea of fasting to anyone unfamiliar with it. After all, that’s what so many of my undergraduate colleagues found themselves doing almost instinctively when news came in of the famine in Ethiopia.
Fasting can also be usefully combined with prayer. If you’ve ever tried to settle down to pray after a big meal, you’ll know how hard it can be. The body just has too much work to do, dealing with everything we’ve thrown into it, and it’s almost impossible to arrive at the inner stillness we need if our spirit is to be truly attentive to the Lord. On the other hand, when our stomach is empty, it’s much easier to focus on the Lord. In fact, as I was saying earlier, our whole being is focussed on our incompleteness, our need for nourishment, and that focus can be just what we need to raise our hearts and minds to engage with the Lord in prayer. At the same time, prayer can provide the focus we often need while we’re fasting, in case we find our attention too taken up with contemplating our stomach or in case we give in to self-pity or pride.
In our Christian tradition, of course, fasting is often linked with the fight against temptation. After all, the Gospels tell us that Jesus, during his fast of forty days in the desert, was tempted by Satan. The desert fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries onwards spent their whole lives imitating Christ in his 40-day desert experience, and they’ve left us all sorts of lurid accounts of their struggles with demons while they were practising the most austere penances you could imagine. That idea of spiritual combat, wrestling with temptation, is part of the reason why we need to build an element of fasting into our lives. Remember the Collect for Ash Wednesday: “Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service, so that as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.” I’m not sure how impressed my fellow undergraduates would have been if I’d quoted that to them. But I think if we’re seriously striving to grow in holiness, to become more Christ-like, if we’re seriously trying to overcome our failings and our sins, we’ll realize that we have to work at strengthening our will to do what the Lord wants of us, especially if he wants us to act against our natural inclinations. If we’re longing to eat the last slice of cake, and we realize we should really offer it to a guest, it takes a strong will to do the decent thing. And if we’re tired and suffering from a head-ache, and we just want to go to bed, it takes a lot of effort to keep on listening to someone we find boring, whether he’s giving us a spiritual conference or pouring out his problems. We need to be masters of our appetites, not to be mastered by them. If regular self-denial forms part of our spiritual lives, then we should find we’re better able to master our appetites when we need to. If we find fasting difficult, we’ll find it difficult to resist all kinds of temptations, small and great.
There’s a danger, of course, with this approach to fasting: instead of offering it to the Lord, we could become rather too pleased with ourselves for having so much will-power and for successfully resisting so many temptations. The temptation to pride is always lurking somewhere, in every spiritual exercise we undertake. That’s why we need to keep refocusing on the Lord, reminding ourselves that we’re doing this to show our love for him, to recall his abundant generosity to us, to express our sorrow for our sins and to help us overcome our weaknesses. One way of dealing with the ever-present risk of pride is to recall the Gospel we heard on Ash Wednesday.
When you fast, do not put on a gloomy look as the hypocrites do: they pull long faces to let people know they are fasting. In truth I tell you, they have had their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that no one will know you are fasting except your Father who sees all that is done in secret. And your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you.
There’s an important principle here, which is that any kind of ostentation in fasting or in other penitential practices runs the risk of making the whole thing null and void. That was really the point of today’s Gospel about those broad phylacteries and long tassels. But fasting secretly is easier said than done. Suppose you decide to fast from alcohol – except when someone offers you a drink, because otherwise they’d know immediately that something was up. You could end up not fasting at all. Avoid ostentation, by all means, but don’t let that become an excuse for avoiding the issue. Your Father who sees all that is done in secret won’t be fooled.
Sometimes people say, I just can’t function if I fast. That’s another problem, because you’ll be no good to anyone if you keep fainting or if you become bad-tempered or if you do your work badly because you’ve been overdoing the fasting. There will be times when you have to give precedence to some other good, particularly if charity demands it of you. I’m reminded of a wonderful passage from the writings of St Vincent de Paul which we have in the Office of Readings on his feast-day:
The service of the poor is to be preferred to all else, and to be performed without delay. If, at a time set aside for prayer, medicine or help has to be brought to some poor man, go and do what has to be done with an easy mind, offering it up to God as a prayer. Do not be put out by uneasiness or a sense of sin because of prayers interrupted by the service of the poor: for God is not neglected if prayers are put aside, if God’s work is interrupted, in order that another such work may be completed. Therefore, when you leave prayer to help some poor man, remember this – that the work has been done for God. Charity takes precedence: since it is itself a great lady, what it orders should be carried out.
So we have a great saint assuring us that even prayer should sometimes be put aside when we have to perform urgent works of charity. The same must surely be true of fasting. Yet once again, we mustn’t allow considerations of this kind to stop us fasting altogether. We may need to reduce it, but if we abandon it completely, our Father who sees all that is done in secret won’t be fooled.
It’s true, of course, that different people have different physical needs and careful discernment is needed to get the level of fasting right. We should find ourselves at some point saying no to our appetite for food. If we don’t even feel hungry, we’re not fasting. But we shouldn’t do any damage to ourselves, or to those who have to live with us while we’re fasting. This is why the Church is often reluctant to go into too much detail about exactly what fasting involves. I’m not sure what the Order says about fasting. For the Church as a whole, the two days in the year when we’re required to fast, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, are days when, apart from abstaining from meat, we’re supposed to have just one proper meal and two light snacks. Many people would say that’s all they ever eat anyway. In that case, they should eat less on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. It’s worth giving some thought to just what level of fasting might be right for you, taking account of all these factors. Of course, fasting is one of the things in the spiritual life that gets easier as the years go by – so maybe we need to do a bit more when we’re older.
Another traditional approach to fasting is to see it as a way of expressing sorrow for sin. You remember how the people of Nineveh responded to Jonah’s preaching by proclaiming a fast.
They proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least. And the king had it proclaimed throughout Nineveh: ‘No person or animal, herd or flock may eat anything; they may not graze, they may not drink any water. All must put on sackcloth and call on God with all their might and let everyone renounce his evil ways and violent behaviour. Who knows? Perhaps God will change his mind and relent, so that we shall not perish?’
It’s appropriate to perform acts of penance and self-denial to express our sorrow for sin and to help reinforce our purpose of amendment. But once again, it’s important to keep a sense of proportion. There’s a great difference between expressing sorrow for our sin and punishing ourselves. When we come before God to express our sorrow, we would do well to keep before us the figure of the prodigal son, who came before his father doing precisely that. The father didn’t impose a fast. He didn’t need to, because his son had already experienced hunger, indeed it was hunger that brought him to his senses and moved him to genuine contrition for what he had done. There’s a time for fasting, but there’s also a time for feasting, and feasting is a more characteristically Christian activity. Surely the bridegroom’s attendants cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.
I’ve tried to offer you a number of different reasons for fasting, and I daresay some will probably make more sense to you than others, and different people will have different preferences. That’s to be expected. I hope each of you will take a little time to consider which makes most sense to you, and then perhaps to make use of it in your Lenten observance. This is a time for fasting, not because the bridegroom isn’t with us, but because he’s in the desert himself, fasting away, in preparation for the events that will lead up to the great marriage feast of Easter. I hope and pray that this joyful season may be for all of you a time of grace, a time to purify your hearts and grow in holiness, so that you can approach the great events of Holy Week and Easter with mind and heart renewed.