A Word from Your Pastor - March 3

Dear Parishioners:
 

I am offering some reflections concerning the three practices of Lent: Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving.  This week, we will look at Fasting.

How do you fast?  This is the traditional Lenten practice that most folks remember practicing in a particular way.  “What are you giving up for Lent?” is the usual question every Catholic boy or girl discusses.  Adults also tend to look at Lent in this same way.  Many have the practice of giving up chocolate or coffee or some other kind of food or beverage that they enjoy.  This form of fasting is good.  It is an effort to exercise self-discipline.  It is a matter, not simply of avoiding sin, but rather of exercising control over one’s own appetites.

In our times, fasting is also applicable to other behaviors.  We can fast from attitudes and habitual ways of responding to others.  We can fast from modern media and the many gadgets that take our time – television, computers, cell phones, ipads, and the many forms of digital games.  Changing our way of thinking and acting by conscious choices about what we do each day, our usual “rituals” and patterns of behavior, can be matter for fasting.

The Church invites us to fast from food in communal way on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.  On Fridays of Lent and throughout the year (an old custom returning in light of current needs), the Church asks us to abstain from meat in solidarity with our brothers and sisters.  The Eastern Church has fasts from other particular foods on specified occasions during the Season of Lent.

Other world religions have forms of fasting that are parallel to the Church’s way of fasting.  Judaism calls for abstaining from foods that are not “kosher.”  Moslem tradition has fasts during the month of Ramadan.  Even modern seculars fast from certain foods for philosophical reasons or for health reasons.  Fasting is a human act that all of us can use to learn to refrain from behaviors good or bad so as to assert our freedom and our submission to God’s Will.

 

Year of Faith October 11, 2012 – November 24, 2013

 

We continue our journey through the Year of Faith.  As one way of observing this year, each week a small section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is read before the start of Mass.  This is a small way of offering some food for growth in Faith throughout this year.

 

 

IN BRIEF

68 By love, God has revealed himself and given himself to man. He has thus provided the definitive, superabundant answer to the questions that man asks himself about the meaning and purpose of his life.

69 God has revealed himself to man by gradually communicating his own mystery in deeds and in words.

70 Beyond the witness to himself that God gives in created things, he manifested himself to our first parents, spoke to them and, after the fall, promised them salvation (cf. Gen 3:15) and offered them his covenant.

71 God made an everlasting covenant with Noah and with all living beings (cf. Gen 9:16). It will remain in force as long as the world lasts.

72 God chose Abraham and made a covenant with him and his descendants. By the covenant God formed his people and revealed his law to them through Moses. Through the prophets, he prepared them to accept the salvation destined for all humanity.

73 God has revealed himself fully by sending his own Son, in whom he has established his covenant for ever. The Son is his Father’s definitive Word; so there will be no further Revelation after him.

Comment: God’s involvement with us includes His action of communicating Himself and His Will to us through Salvation History, and especially through Jesus Christ His Son.  This initiative of God’s calls for a response in Faith on our part, and an acknowledgment of Who God Is, through acceptance of Jesus as the center of our own lives.  How does your life witness to the truth that you are responding to God’s Gift of Himself to you?