How much is enough? This question faces us each day that senseless violence seems to tear away at the dignity and livelihood of our world and existence. Violence does not always come by way of external weapons alone. Indeed, the source of violence comes many times from broken or confused hearts. When we are hurt, we pull back into a reserve. We constrict ourselves in anger, dissolution, discouragement, and fear until it boils over into an action that can be devastating and death-dealing to everyone. And then comes the reaction wherein we bounce the ‘ball’ of violent actions and reactions back and forth to each other across the illusion of a boundary that separates us, never seeing that we are only keeping up the momentum of a dangerous game that cannot see itself for what it is. How much is enough? What could break this vicious cycle of fear, violence and retributive notions of justice?

In the first Friday of Lent’s scripture readings (1 Is 58:1-9a), we have the prophet Isaiah describing this ping-pong pattern of perpetuating violence in relation to what he refers to as ‘fasting’:

Lo, on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits,
and drive all your laborers.
Yes, your fast ends in quarreling and fighting,
striking with wicked claw.
Would that today you might fast
so as to make your voice heard on high!
Is this the manner of fasting I wish,
of keeping a day of penance:
That a man bow his head like a reed
and lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?

 

Fasting is traditionally seen as a means of purifying one’s intentions by drawing back from things so as to see something differently. But I wonder if this ‘pulling back’ or constricting oneself can also sometimes contribute to in fact adding to a misconception of what God may indeed want from us.  I am not knocking this traditional sense of ‘fasting.’  ‘Fasting’ is a powerful mental and spiritual tool, but it is not an end in itself.  If we only ‘fast’ in a way that draws us deeper into ourselves – as the ‘me’ or ego self – then we can feel quite naturally a certain superiority and from this can become judgmental and even violent, “quarreling and fighting, striking with wicked claw?”  How can we “make our voice heard on high,” as Isaiah speaks about in this reading?

What if ‘fasting’ can be looked at as a means not simply of refraining from certain things and so to speak depriving ourselves of something, but rather as a means of emptying ourselves of our ‘selves’? This sounds a little like ‘death’ perhaps, but it actually may have more to do with life.  By emptying ourselves of those things that we think are who we are (father, mother, professional, addict, etc.) we suddenly are ‘giving something away.’   We are surrendering the idols of identification with our roles, successes and defeats in life and emptying ourselves.  This emptying means that we take the focus off of ourselves and our familiar means of identifying ourselves what we say, do and have, and this allows us to engage with others and with life in a way that offers real life to everyone.  Isaiah describes this type of ‘fasting’:

Setting free the oppressed,
breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry,
sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
Clothing the naked when you see them,
and not turning your back on your own.

And what can then happen, he goes on to say,

“Then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your wound shall quickly be healed!”

The pattern is broken, the ball of blame that we keep paddling back and forth to each other falls off the table and there is nothing but the shared light dawning in the radiance of our love and concern for one another because we begin to awaken to the sense that we are not isolated and alone. The radiant light of God’s love flowing out to us and through us is realized as our true shared identity.  So we can then perhaps start behaving as if we are connected and begin to see that if one of us is bound we are all bound, if one of us is loved we are all loved.  There is no bouncing ball here, only a squandering of ‘self’ that does not constrict but only gives away.  We begin to realize our identity is to participate fully in God’s divine giving away and releasing of love into each other’s lives.  The retreat director and Episcopal priest, Cynthia Bourgeault, describes this squandering of the ‘self’ as the extravagant path wherein we recognize that the divine flow of life comes to and through us if we only allow it.[i]   It’s not always a matter of reserving and pulling back, but of “throwing it away” from abundance.

Perhaps this is why Jesus answers the question put to him by John’s disciples about why Jesus’ disciples do not fast the way he does in today’s Gospel (Mt 9:14-15):

“Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?

This is not the only time that Jesus uses the wedding image as a way of speaking of being in relationship with God and indeed with each other. This is a metaphor for the abundance of love that can only live by giving itself away.  This is another way of looking at ‘fasting.’  I would go so far as to suggest that only when we approach a sense of ‘fasting’ from things from the perspective of the interconnectedness of all of us in the Abundant center of the Divine Life – which for the disciples in the Gospel is with Jesus – can we truly offer the ‘fasting’ that God desires, as Isaiah puts it.

How could God want anything less than for us to be truly happy by nudging us always into a deeper way of experiencing the divine in our everyday lives, i.e., in service and care for each other. Could God be found anywhere else but in this liberating communion?  This is a fast flowing from and releasing into abundance!

 

[i] Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Lanham , MD:  Cowley Publications,  2004), pp 84-85.

Peace,
Thomas