Friday After Ash Wednesday

[cappie]

Today's Readings Isaiah 58:1-9  Matthew 9:14-15

USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/15_02_20.mp3

Doing good deeds for others accomplishes much more than we gain by fasting from delicious foods.

Today’s readings challenge us to re-consider our notion of fasting. We are called to a radical shift from our private discipline of forgoing “macaroni and cheese” to a public response which involves action and risk. It is also an invitation to bring healing to our world.
God speaks in the Isaiah reading to us and says, “Is not this the sort of fast that pleases me – it is the Lord who speaks –to break unjust fetters and undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke, to share your bread with the hungry, and shelter the homeless poor, to clothe the man you see to be naked and not turn from your own kin? Then will your light shine like the dawn”

If we accept God’s challenge to be partners with God in the healing of the world, we are also invited to fast from our own personal habits and patterns which may be keeping us from God. Fasting from anger, resentment, criticism, selfishness, not loving ourselves, indifference or apathy can bring our lives and relationships more in touch with the peace that God has offered and which was modelled in the life of God’s son, Jesus. We are then prepared to reach out to others and while we are setting them free of their oppression, we are also being set free by them.

Happiness can be manufactured to some extent, and usually only for short periods; but joy is a stroke from beyond. Joyless religion may be the profoundest denial of God. If there is no joy in it, it’s all your own work, so what need have you of God? If the Resurrection is not visible in you, then you are preaching death without resurrection. One of the fruits of the Spirit is joy, and it is mentioned next after love in St Paul’s list, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22). If you had no love in you, you could hardly claim to be a Christian; likewise joy (and all the others). These fruits are the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit.

Joy does not come from avoiding pain and sorrow; on the contrary it is possible only when we have gone into the heart of our pain and sorrow. We have to go into the heart of it and experience a certain transformation, the characteristic shift that is the sign that the ‘chemistry’ of the Gospel is working. If we avoid the process nothing happens; we would have to continue all our lives to avoid it. That way there is no joy, only endless desperate flight.

https://gregrowles.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/friday-after-ash-wednesday/

[Catlick]

We are called to a radical shift from our private discipline of forgoing “macaroni and cheese” to a public response which involves action and risk. It is also an invitation to bring healing to our world.

 

 

Why 'shift'? This implies giving up regular fasting - exactly what large parts of the Church have already done: they fast on feast days like Ash Wednesday but not on the week days during Lent (as the Church required until the Great Leap Forward in the 1960s). Has this abandonment of traditional fast practice brought us closer to God? I think not. 

 

I would speak about 'combine' instead of 'shift'. Following Christ means not only helping the poor, but also fasting. 

Edited February 20, 2015 by Catlick

[cappie]

You are correct in the homily delivered I did make the distinction. When I was growing up (a long time ago pre Vat 11) penance was seen generally as solely a private affair what I would do, how it would benefit me and my relationship with God, the vision of Isiah was not as prominent, though it has always been there, as has the individual fasting and penitential practices. 

[Catlick]

Let us mourn in a private chamber, learning the way of peni­-

 

  tence,

 

               And then let us learn the joyful communion of saints.

 

- T.S. Eliot

Edited February 21, 2015 by Catlick