March 25, 2009

‘He Fasted’: A reflection on the Pope’s 2009 Lenten Message

Honing our hunger

By Sister Genevieve Glen

A Laramie friend once told us, “Wyoming has two seasons: winter and road repair.” Northern Colorado does, too. During the winter, we make potholes. During the spring and summer, we fill them in.  Next year, we make the same potholes because the material used to fill last year’s wasn’t strong enough to withstand the traffic. The Highway Department does its best. Eventually, they repave the whole road. 

Pope Benedict suggests that Lent is a good season to take a hard look at the potholes and the stuff with which we fill them. Fasting provides us with an honest lens. We can fast in different ways, of course.  We can fast from what we really do not need. The Holy Father, quoting St. Basil, gives the fruit of one tree among many in the garden of Eden as an example. Adam and Eve didn’t need the forbidden fruit to live. The serpent tricked Eve into wanting it. The irony is painful. We do not have to look too hard to discover all the junk food for body and for spirit that we learn to want but do not really need to live. Like our first parents, we suffer the resulting irony: by indulging our wants, we risk the possibility of reducing our life span, both in body and in spirit. We can also fast from what we do need to live but need in lesser quantity than we imagine. In either case, whether we fast from inessentials or essentials, we soon find ourselves hungry. 

The interaction between hunger and our decision to fast offers us an opportunity. Rather than indulge the hunger immediately, we are prompted to answer some important questions. First: What am I really hungry for? A piece of chocolate cake. Why am I hungry for it? What need does that cake meet?  Pleasure? Comfort?  A desire to feel cared for? The human psyche is skilled at masking our deeper hungers behind smaller ones.  Honest reflection will teach us a lot about what drives us and what trips us.  What are the potholes lying open at our feet, hidden by only the thinnest layer of asphalt? That kind of knowledge is the first graced step toward freedom.

Second: How will I satisfy my hunger?  Habit, reinforced by cultural persuasion, will present us with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads. That cake would taste good right now. What can one cigarette hurt? I’m really tired, I deserve a break—what’s on TV?  Whatever we chose to fast from will look like those melons, leeks and onions that tempted Israel in the desert to head back to Egypt, that little matter of slavery now overlooked.  The same Tempter who invited Jesus to shortcut his hunger by making bread for himself (not for anyone else) is the one proposing a quick and selfish fix for our discomfort, whatever its cause.   But the potholes filled with such cheap materials are the ones we will find widening before us next winter.

The temptation to fill the empty holes with something can be very strong. The consumer impulse toward more, new and different is allergic to emptiness: empty time, empty space, empty prayer.  The allergy builds on an illusion, the Tempter’s specialty.  No time, no space, no prayer is empty. God is always present. Since God is love, love is always present. Our perceptions and feelings may not be able to touch that love, but the love is no less real. Desert emptiness is the landscape of Lent. Self-emptying with the Crucified through fasting, almsgiving and prayer is the pattern of Lent. In that emptiness, we find not the nothingness we fear but the living God whom we seek—and who came to our deserts in the person of Christ seeking us: “Through fasting and prayer, we allow (Christ) to come and satisfy the deepest hunger we experience …— the hunger and thirst for God” (Pope Benedict).

Fasting can reveal the painful forces that drive us, but it also reveals the face of the Love that drives the universe—and pays the bill to repave the Easter road so we can travel it in safety and in joy.

Sister Genevieve Glen is a Benedictine nun at the Abbey of St. Walburga in Virginia Dale, Colo., and a highly regarded author, poet and composer of hymn texts.