Beirut

“…BUT BY PRAYER AND FASTING” #3

What then is fasting for us Christians? It is our entrance and participation in that experience of Christ Himself by which He liberates us from the total dependence on food, matter, and the world. By no means is our liberation a full one. Living still in a fallen world, in the world of the Old Adam, being part of it, we still depend on food. But just as our death –through which we still must pass- has become by virtue of Christ’s death a passage into life, the food we eat and the life it sustains can be life in God and for God. Part of our food has already become “food if immortality” –the body and blood of Christ Himself. But even the daily brads we receive from God can be in this life and in this world that which strengthens us, our communion with God, rather than that which separates us from God. Yet it is only fasting that can perform that transformation, giving us the existential proof that our dependence on food and matter is not total, not absolute, that united to prayer, grace, and adoration, it can itself be spiritual.

All this means that deeply understood, fasting is the only means by which man recovers his true spiritual nature. It is not a theoretical but truly a practical challenge to the great Liar who managed to convince us that we depend on bread alone and built all human knowledge, science, and existence on that lie. Fasting is a denunciation of that lie and also proof that it is a lie. It is highly significant that it was while fasting that Christ met with Satan and that He said later that Satan cannot be overcome “but by fasting and prayer.” Fasting is the real fight against the devil because it is a challenge to that one all-embracing law which makes him the “Prince of this world.” Yet is one is hungry and then discovers that he can truly be independent of that hunger, not be destroyed by it but just on the contrary, can transform it into a source of spiritual power and victory, then nothing remains of that great lie which we have been living since Adam.

…In summary: from a symbolic and nominal fast –the fast as obligation and custom- we must return to the real fast. Let it be limited and humble but consistent and serious. Let us honestly face our spiritual and physical capacity and act accordingly remembering, however, that there is no fast without challenging that capacity, without introducing into our life a divine proof that things impossible with men are possible with God.