Tag: asceticism

“Cheating” on Sundays

This isn’t entirely relevant, but check out the awesome Lenten manicure I got! I know it should be purple, but we were at a pink party, so deal. Seriously, though, how amazing are the crucifixes on our thumbs? And I have crosses on every finger. Basically, Madi who did my manicure is my favorite ever.

I’m sure this is old news to you, but you can eat whatever you want on Sunday. Sundays are considered days of rejoicing in the Catholic Church, each one a “little Easter.” On the first day of the week we celebrate the resurrection, most importantly by going to Mass but also by feasting. Because of this, Catholics are traditionally considered to be relieved of their Lenten penances on Sundays.1 Solemnities, too, are days of feasting, so enjoy your chocolate-covered bacon on the Solemnity of St. Joseph and the Annunciation, even if they do fall on Friday.

But the idea behind feasting on Sunday is not that we celebrate the resurrection with gluttony, that we indulge in some of the sinful behavior we gave up for Lent, or that we don’t pray as we’ve promised to. If you quit cursing for Lent, please don’t wake up Sunday with a resounding “@#*%@$^#$!!” Likewise, if you’re praying a rosary daily, Sunday is not the day to take off. But if you gave up sweets, there’s nothing wrong with celebrating the Lord’s resurrection with a slice of cake and a few pieces of chocolate.

Before you call me lame or a cheater or a heretic,2 take a minute to recall how long Lent is. That’s right, 40 days. But how many days are there between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday? Well, shoot, there are 46! Take out Sundays and you’re back to 40. See?

Sunday in LentNow, you’re not obligated to feast on Sundays; maybe Lent is more meaningful to you if you’re in the desert the whole time rather than taking dessert breaks. But a little Sunday feasting can be a good idea if you can be reasonable about it. I think the occasional indulgence makes fasting that much more of a sacrifice. If you’re on a juice fast, for example, you eventually stop getting hungry. Resetting your fast every week makes it more sacrificial. And feasting on Sunday reminds you all day long that this day is set apart. I never really lived the liturgical year until I started feasting on Sundays, Solemnities, and Feasts.3 Now, I always know whose feast it is and what’s coming up and I really long for these liturgical celebrations, It’s not just about a little bit of chocolate–feasting makes these days feel like the Feasts that they are.

But Sunday being a little Easter cuts both ways. Our Sundays ought to look different from the rest of the week all year long–obligatory Mass attendance being the most obvious distinction–but particularly in Lent. So as the first Sunday in Lent approaches, consider how you can celebrate Sundays.

If you’re a student–or a teacher, or anyone else who’s got a tone of work to do at home–I highly recommend taking Sunday as an actual Sabbath. That’s right, no work. I first did this in college and never quit afterwards because it was such a blessing. Think about it: you wake up Sunday morning and literally the only thing you have to do is go to Mass. So you go to Mass, have a leisurely brunch, and get coffee with a friend. As your roommate works frantically on his lab report, you kick back and read a book. As your boyfriend holes up in the library to finish a paper that was assigned 6 weeks ago, you make a chapel visit and then watch a chick flick. Now, you may have done those things anyway, but you would have felt guilty. The beauty of the Sabbath is that you have to rest–you couldn’t be doing anything productive even if you wanted to!

I know that most of you feel that you have entirely too much work to do to take Sundays off. Give me a break. With very few exceptions, if you refocus your whole week so that Sundays are free, there’s plenty of time. Maybe you can’t go out Friday or Saturday nights because you’re in finishing an assignment for Monday. Maybe that’s good for you. In the two and a half years that I did this, I think I may have had two Sundays where I had worked my butt off all week and still couldn’t finish. So I got the work done early Sunday and had the rest of my Sabbath to nap, pray, and visit with friends. There’s a reason God gave us a day of rest–it’s amazing! So why not at least give it a shot?

If you’ve got a family, try making Sunday family day. Shut the computer off all day and go out to a movie or a museum or the park. Bake cookies to celebrate the fact that you can eat sweets on Sunday. Pray a family rosary or have a family Bible study. Rejoice in the fact that you’re not fasting, yes, but rejoice in faith and family as well.

If you’re single, Sunday’s a great day to make a holy hour, get a documentary about a Saint on Netflix, or go to your mom’s house for dinner–and bring the meal. Or just turn off your phone and your computer, put away the work you brought home with you, and sit around doing nothing. If you’re anything like me, you don’t do enough of that.

Because the only obligatory fasts in our Church fall on a Wednesday and a Friday, it’s entirely up to you whether or not you break your fast on Sundays. Take some time to pray about it: could you avoid being gluttonous? Would your feasting truly be a celebration of the Resurrection? Would fasting all the way through make Easter more meaningful for you? But do take this Lent as an opportunity to begin a more intentional celebration of the Sabbath. The day of rest was given us as a gift–accept it and rejoice!

  1. In much the same way, every Friday is a “little Good Friday”–which is why all Catholics are obliged to make some sort of sacrifice every Friday of the year. The U.S. bishops recommend abstaining from meat. [↩]
  2. Which may all be true, just not in respect to chocolate on Sundays. I’m really not making this up. [↩]
  3. The real ones that are technically called Feasts, not any random memorial of a Saint. [↩]

10 Reasons We Fast

Image via flickr

I love my kids, and I always loved teaching, hard as it was, but I am not sorry to be missing the whining today. “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe we have to have pizza today! Why can’t I just have a hamburger? This is so stupid! The cafeteria should at least serve meat so people have the option to choose. Why does the Church get to tell me what I can and can’t eat? Am I really going to go to hell if I have a little bacon? That’s not fair!” You think I am exaggerating. I am not.

I’m always amazed at how we can sit before a God who was stripped, beaten, and nailed to a cross for us and say that anything is “too much” to ask. Oh, I do it, don’t get me wrong. But when you think about the size of our sacrifice compared to the size of his, it seems rather pathetic to deny him. And yet when it comes to food (and sex), we are decidedly ready to.

Now, I love food. But the Lord drew me to fasting from almost the beginning of my walk with him. I was 15 when I started making significant sacrifices outside of Lent and 17 when I first really fasted–not the unimpressive one-regular-meal-and-two-small-meals rule that most of the world just calls eating, but the kind where you don’t eat for more than 8 hours at a time.1 At first, I was just being obedient to the promptings of the Spirit, but as the years have gone by and the Lord has led me to fast in many and various ways, I’ve begun to see just how much fasting can teach us.

In this world of food television, fast food, and gatherings that always and everywhere center around food, it can be hard to see the point of real fasting. Sure, I can give up chocolate so that I know I’m a good Christian, but what does it actually accomplish? If you’re just doing it because that’s what good Christians do, I would imagine it accomplishes very little. But if you’re submitting in obedience, uniting your sacrifice to Christ’s, or seeking the meaning of the practice, there is so much the Lord has to offer you through the gift of fasting.

  1. When you fast, you tell the Lord that you love him more than food.
    I think this is the most basic level, the first thing we understand about fasting as a child. Every piece of candy we don’t eat, every meal we skip is a love letter to the Lord. Early on, it’s very hard, but gradually we begin to put Christ first so that a snack or even (God help us) a piece of bacon seems nothing compared to Christ.
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  2. Fasting helps to detach you from your psychological dependence on food. I think Americans especially are obsessed with food; we let it rule us. The idea of having enough self-control to skip a snack, let alone a meal, is astounding to us. But when you choose hunger for love of God, you begin to realize that hunger isn’t so bad. After years of fasting, I don’t have to plan my life around food.2 Food is a gift or a detail, never the driving force in my life. There’s great freedom in that.
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  3. Fasting makes eating worshipful. If you’ve ever been really hungry–I mean really hungry–you know that the first bite of stale bagel is rapturous. That whole first meal, really, is the best thing you’ve ever tasted. Far from running from food because the world is evil, fasting teaches us to find God in the good things of creation. And if you fast frequently, you get in the habit of worshiping when you eat.3 Every good food becomes a prayer and soon you see the whole world as sacramental–which, after all, is the point.
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  4. Fasting gives you mastery over your body. More than just helping you to rule your appetite, fasting teaches you to rule your appetites. When you fast, you discipline your body and learn to be its master, not its slave. I don’t know how people can be chaste when they haven’t practiced self-mastery in the arena of food first. If you can learn to deny yourself in what is an actual need, your ability to deny yourself a great desire is strengthened dramatically.
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  5. Fasting unites you to the suffering Christ. I’m not just being flippant when I say “Jesus suffocated to death for you; I think you can handle skipping snack time.” During Lent, we walk with our suffering God through the desert, up the hill, and onto the Cross. When our Lenten journey is more than inconvenient, when it’s actually painful, to a degree, we can offer our hearts to him and learn to love him better. We suffer for love of him, which consoles his bleeding heart and teaches us just how deeply he loves us.
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  6. Fasting teaches you to accept every cross, not just the ones you choose. I once found myself furious because I had been looking forward to lemonade and my table was given tea instead. It took me a minute to realize that I would gladly have chosen to go the whole day without food but I just could not accept not getting a drink that I didn’t even particularly like. For many of us, the great difficulty of our particular cross is that it is chosen for us. The more we learn to take up the crosses of our choosing, the more we learn to embrace the one that is thrust upon us. True fasting makes me decrease and him increase. I learn to rely on his strength at work in me; if he can carry this little cross I made for myself, he can certainly carry the big one he picked out for me.
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  7. Fasting changes your attitude to discomfort. Before I started fasting, hunger was misery, an occasion for whining and self-pity. After years of training, my automatic reaction to hunger is to pray. There are even times when I find myself praising God for the hunger before remembering that I’m not fasting, I just haven’t gotten around to eating. When hunger is prayer, it’s not hard to make pain and exhaustion and other physical discomfort prayer. We adjust our attitudes by surrendering our bodies to God and before long we find that virtue isn’t as hard as it once seemed.
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  8. Fasting teaches you to live in solidarity with the poor. I hear people say “I’m starving” all the time. “No,” I want to shout, “You aren’t!” You know who’s starving? Orphans in Africa and lepers in Calcutta and even, God help us, some people on our streets here at home. But you? You’re barely even hungry. I know the difference, because I’ve tasted that “starving” you throw around. Not starving to death, no, and not by necessity but by choice. It’s not the same and I don’t want to pretend that the hunger I took on is as crippling as the tragedy of poverty and hunger in this world. Still, I’ve felt a hunger so deep that you stop being hungry. When you’ve experienced that type of hunger, it’s hard to be swayed by missing a meal. And it’s easy to ache with love for those who don’t choose starvation. Now I’m not recommending that you starve yourself by any means, but if you’ve been really hungry–even gone 24 hours without food–the word “starving” will come less easily to your lips and aid for the poor will come more readily out of your pocketbook.
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  9. Fasting humbles you. When you’re awkwardly turning down food without telling people why,4 you’re humbled. When you realize how addicted you are to Pop Rocks, you’re humbled. When you’re so hungry you get light-headed and you have to break your fast to honor your body, when your hunger makes you cranky, when you realize just how little control you have over your body or your mind, when you realize how much you take for granted, you’re humbled and humbled and humbled again.
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  10. Courtesy of Kelly.

    Fasting strengthens your prayer.  The testimony of Scripture is clear on this issue: “this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting.” Fasting purifies our intentions and puts force behind our prayers. When you’re fasting for an intention, you’re telling God how much you mean it. This Lent, will you consider adding one sacrifice (food or otherwise) to your list of resolutions specifically for the Holy Father and the conclave that will elect his successor? It doesn’t have to be anything much, but every time you’re tempted, throw up a prayer for our German Shepherd and the man who will step into his large, holy shoes.

Now, there are many people who can’t fast in an extreme way, for whatever reason. If you can’t skip a meal, there are favorite foods you can cut out. If you’ve struggled with an eating disorder, though, your penance will be to eat. For you, dear one, that is penance enough.

Go to Focus for the whole infographic

For the rest of you, I’d like to challenge you to pray about stepping up your game this Lent. If you’re psychologically dependent on snacks, give them up. If you “need” 3 square meals a day, try cutting back to two on Fridays. Go vegan for Lent or just cut out meat. If you’re being led to something more extreme, I’ll assume you’re working with a spiritual director and don’t need my ideas. I’m only beginning to learn the lessons that I’ve listed above–I’m certainly no expert on fasting or holiness or prayer or really anything at all. But I feel so blessed to have been led to fast and thought I ought to propose to you all that there is more to fasting than just skipping your snack and calling it a day. It’s not too late to up the ante this Lent.

If nothing else, though, you’re looking at one regular meal and two small meals today and Good Friday and abstinence today and every Friday in Lent.  The Church in her wisdom has required these minor sacrifices of us; let’s offer them joyfully to the Lord and see what he has to teach us.

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This song by Jimmy Needham (love him!) is a beautiful meditation on today’s first reading. Enjoy–and happy Lent, friends! May the Father strengthen you to persevere in your penances; may the Son rejoice in your heart as it suffers with and for him; may the Spirit bring you wisdom and clarity through the sacrifices you make for love of him.

 

  1. I’m not going to go into details. I usually don’t talk about fasting in a way that will give people any idea about how I fast, but I think I should today. Just know that I’m healthy and prayed up and that you should discuss anything ridiculous with a spiritual director. [↩]
  2. If you’re diabetic or hypoglycemic or have struggled with eating disorders, this is not something to aspire to. Be where you are–God loves you just there. [↩]
  3. Not what you eat, although breaking your fast with the Eucharist can be just incredible. [↩]
  4. Do try not to tell people why. If you’re telling everybody how hard your fasting is, you might as well just start eating again. That’s the point of today’s Gospel: fasting is between you and God, not you and God and your friends and your frenemies and Facebook…. [↩]