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February 16, 2007

A Shhepherd’s Message

By Archbishop Daniel N. DiNardo

I have just returned from the Houston Museum of Fine Arts where there is a splendid Exhibition of French Paintings from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. They are all masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is difficult to choose favorites, but I must confess that I was drawn to the “still-life” paintings of Paul Cezanne, perhaps because this column was on my mind. The fruit displayed in these paintings, so rich and colorful and real, profiled against strong vertical and horizontal lines of tables and walls in subdued colors, helped to remind me of the symbol of food, beyond its natural use as biological sustenance for our lives. The paintings reveal food in profusion, fruits alive with their own form and tint, their very beauty and attractiveness. They are wonders of the goodness and beauty of creation. Yet our dealings with them are to use them so that more than our biological lives may be nurtured. I mention this because we are about to enter the season of Lent next week, a season that itself is preoccupied with food.

Next Wednesday we will sign our foreheads with ashes, with the sign of death, and we will enter a forty day period of repentance and renewal, a spiritual quarantine (the word itself coming from the Latin “quaranta,” meaning “forty,” an obvious reference to Lent). This quarantine has always focused on prayer, works of charity, and fasting. Fasting and abstinence from bodily food form a Lenten discipline: the emptying of self that leaves room for Christ to fill us. Yet it is not fasting and abstinence alone that count, as though there was some general Church diet for six weeks. The fasting must be accompanied by prayer and by outreach, a theme sounded as early as the origins of Lent in the late 2nd and early 3rd century and hammered as a theme thereafter. There is an early Church writer who thunders that a fasting without prayer and charity is a fasting of demons, because, out of pride, “demons never eat!” The fasting in Lent is not about pounds lost or merely human dietary heroics. What governs Christian fasting?

In one of the early episodes of the public life of Jesus Christ, recorded in the Gospel of St. Mark, the disciples are reproached by the Scribes and Pharisees for not fasting as they should. Jesus’ response is telling: “Can the wedding guests fast as long as the Bridegroom is with them; as long as he is with them they cannot fast. But the days will come when the Bridegroom is taken away. Then they will fast.” Later in the same Gospel, at the Last Supper, right before the words instituting the Eucharist, Jesus makes a solemn vow before His Apostles, a vow made at Passover which always carried the greatest weight in Jewish tradition. “Amen, Amen I say to you, I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine again, until I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.” This poignant and startling statement indicated that Jesus would indeed be fasting as He went to the Garden of Gethsemane, to trial, mockery and Crucifixion: these events usher in the Kingdom of God definitively. At His Resurrection, He, the Risen Lord, now eats and drinks with us and gives Himself as food. First, the Bridegroom had to be taken away. The shock and sorrow at this absence, the cost paid for the malice of sin, will send the Church, His Bride, into fasting, prayer and works of charity each year as she contemplates the price of our salvation, the costliness of grace. Ordinary food loses its attractiveness when seen against such generosity. The first discipline of fasting and abstinence in the history of the Church was in fact called the Bridegroom Fast, an intense but brief period of forty hours from Holy Thursday Evening until Holy Saturday Evening. The fast was then extended for a week, and gradually under the influence of the forty day fast of Jesus in the desert and the need to prepare those to be baptized with genuine spiritual discipline, a discipline of mind, soul and body, moved itself into the current six weeks of six days of fasting plus four days.

The fasting and abstinence today is greatly mitigated from the past: fasting for adults on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and abstinence from meat on Ash Wednesday and all the Fridays of Lent. This communal solidarity by all the members of the Church is to be balanced by a genuine personal decision on prayer, fasting and works of charity and justice by each of us during the great Lenten quarantine. Some people say they prefer “doing something positive for Lent” rather than being negative. I am not opposed to such sentiments, but frankly Lent is a time of bright sadness. The ancient word for Lent was the time for compunction: it is to puncture our over stuffed egos and it is to deflate our overly inflated sense of importance. If we are filled too much with ourselves, there is no room for Christ or for the neighbor. In American culture food is the true sign of our “over-inflation.” Fasting, accompanied by a rich diet of reading God’s Word, is a remarkable antidote to the idolatry of food. The fasting and prayer of Lent help to revivify our sometimes lackluster faith, our lack of joy over being redeemed, our lack of sorrow over sin. Remember: at Gethsemane Jesus saw sin with all the excuses removed. No wonder He fell to the ground! No wonder He fasted and even refused vinegar wine at the Cross. The reason for fasting is the total lesson that Jesus teaches and embodies. It is a lesson in the right use of things and an invitation to come to Him, to become His friend, His disciple, His beloved. This all happens at His invitation and call; that call has been given to His Bride, the Church. We are that Church.

The genuine fasting of Lent is a fasting from sin and a rediscovery of our new birth in Christ. I highly recommend the practice of daily Mass in Lent; the readings from Scripture at the Lenten Sunday and Weekday Masses are extraordinary and profound. They are a catechism of living in Christ. Receiving the Sacrament of Reconciliation is a must, a puncture wound that heals us. Outreach to those who are in need is what keeps fasting from being a sheer matter of pride. Prayer, the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross where we follow the Lord in his combat and victory, and contemplation where our prayer leads us to a deeper silence with the Lord are magnificent components of Lenten practice. I also beg the members of the local Church of Galveston-Houston to remember our catechumens and candidates and accompany them by prayer and support as they celebrate their last Lent before their entrance into the Catholic Church; they are almost 2,000 in number. May they persevere!

At the beginning of this column, I mentioned Cezanne’s paintings; he loves to paint apples. We are aware of another scene, from Scripture itself, from Chapter Three of the Book of Genesis, where the first man and woman ate forbidden fruit. Their “original” sin was to maliciously take the good of creation and imagine that it would make them gods. They mistook the creature for the Creator. Their “original” sin was a kind of idolatry, falsely thinking that a creature made them God. Human beings have always repeated that folly. Lent calls us to order, to repentance and renewal. By such compunction we come to greater intimacy and can then, with open eyes, behold the Resurrection and our own transformation by Christ. We fast for forty days of Lent; we feast for fifty days of Easter. Our Bridegroom has become our food, our bread. In his Eucharistic gift, his Risen Life changes us all. Let us prepare well by a Lent of power!