This is a fast post: I'm moving fast at 39,001 feet in an airplane over Peoria (it has WiFi!), and I will write fast, and I'm thinking about fasting (the subject of the column I'm drafting for next week).
I'm still contemplating Luke's account of the temptation in the desert. I love this wonderfully blunt piece about Lenten practices and that Gospel by Barbara Brown Taylor. (H/T Exilicchaplain)
The question du jour: Why do I fast? Why do any of us? I'd love to know your thoughts!
I think this might be in the same category as memorization.
ReplyDeleteI don't anymore, though I did fairly seriously for part of college and according to the modest present RC requirements for quite a while afterwards. Given my abuse history, I have found it quite emotionally/spiritually damaging so I am grateful to have the freedom to make that discernment now....Though I sometimes quite miss the community bonding experience of taking it on together. (One of its main points, according to Mary Douglas' analysis of analogous levels of control in the social body and physical body).
ReplyDeleteMy fasting is much like all of my spiritual journey ... messy, incremental, filled with resistance and fear, much more like a process of building stone by stone rather than a fully formed pillar of strength.
ReplyDeleteFasting usually opens my mind up to a host of locusts and other plagues in the form of hypochondria and anxiety - my heart! my blood sugar! my breath! You'll never survive. You'll never make it. You can't possibly do this. What's the point? Who do you think you are? Jesus - ha!
Pictures usually rendered of Jesus and the devil in the desert have The Lord looking pretty darn handsome and fairly clean.
I always feel ragged, worn, dirty, scraggly, imperfect and bloodied.
And I'm only talking 24 hours! :)
I don't think any Saints need to be too worried about me pushing them off their cushions!