A church that I very much like, run by people I very much like, here in DC, has women in the church on a "prayer and fast" Tuesday. The purpose of the fast is to pray for the nation, for their own spiritual lives, for good things. The women aren't being called to a traditional 24-hour fast from food. They could give up whatever they wanted - it might be pasta or caffeine or whatever might be challenging to them. As one who very much believes in non-traditional fasts - from politics for instance - I like the idea.
The more I've thought about it, however, the more I wonder if this "prayer and fast Tuesday" isn't fairly lame. I mean giving up pasta? Giving up coffee? Sure, that might be a challenge. But if it is a challenge, what does it say about us a people? I mean seriously, if giving up pasta is a challenge, who are we?
It might be the kind of baby steps necessary to set one on the path to greater holiness. But it also seems possible that it is a symptom of fat, lazy, happy, American Christianity - a Christianity that demands so little from us as to barely resemble the radical Christianity that Jesus preached and demanded.
I am FAR, FAR, FAR from immune here. I say this not out of judgment but out of empathy and and personal conviction and general observation. What does Jesus think about "his" churches?
Wondering...
Sunday March 4, 2007
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I heard a homily today that perhaps touched me more deeply than any I have heard in some time. I must say that our priest is the best preacher I have every heard - Catholic or Protestant. At any rate he was speaking of the "transfiguration" and described the immediate time before Jesus went with his friends to the mountain as a time when those moments of knowing that death was coming were overwhelming. We know those moments - momentamori - everytime we look at pictures of dying children in Iraq, every single time we become aware of global warming, of the issues of Darfur, of Palestine, of our common human end. So Jesus and Peter, James and John are fully aware of what is coming and somehow they go up to the mountain and there is a moment of knowledge that life is greater than this threat of death - a moment to be remembered - otium being the word that describes it. Each time we watch a birth of amazing life we have one of those moments. The moment in Huck Finn when Jim and Huck talk all night, the moment in Anne Franke when she knows that people are good at heart, the moments when we are fully aware that life and goodness will always be more important and more powerful than anything that is death dealing. A tumor has nothing on the prospect of a son being born.
I must admit that I am looking at fasting and what it means to me. And I do feel like I'm just playing around with spiritual discipline, especially the fasting. Why? Because fankly I have never gone hungry before. Yes, I've been hungry - for an hour or two. But to delibertly fast is something I find intimdateing. The most I have done is to fast during the day of good Friday.
But I'm thinking that this Lenten season, I should be willing to be physcially hungry so that I can clear out some spiritual debris. Of couse, another part of it is that I grew up in a tradition that didn't practice Lent or fasting as a spiritual discipline. And, at the age of 38, I finally heard a sermon about the three disciplines of Christianity - Fasting (good for the body), Prayer (good for the soul) and Alms-giving (good for the community). So this season, I am trying to practice all three. And it's fasting that I find the hardest. In our culture, we are told that doing without is a great hardship. I 'm not sure I believe that.
In regards to following outlets of self-denial so that we can begin to feel the cravings of the Spirit above the cravings of the body: I am reminded of 1Cor. 2:2 which says " For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." What a seemingly unrealizable resolution! I would say that we all like to entertain the pleasant thought of being self-less, but when it comes to giving up a meal or even a condiment, our inner child too often resembles a 2 year old with a death grip on a Turkish Delight -- "mine, mine, mine" =)
"...You are not your own; you were bought at a price..." --(1 Cor 6:19b-20a)
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