Dominica I Quadragesimae

9 March 2025

“Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over, he was hungry.”

          There are a lot of ways to fast. Fasting is giving up something good in itself, but we deprive ourselves of it for a time to obtain a greater spiritual benefit. In the process, we unite ourselves to Christ in His sufferings, asking for the merits of His Passion that we experience in our bodies, to heal a wound of sin, or to obtain some good for ourselves or another. It is precisely the goodness of the thing that we give up, that makes depriving ourselves of it to be a source of merit. (So while we should be striving not to sin at all time and especially during Lent, strictly speaking, you can’t fast from sin. That just wouldn’t be fasting.)

          In the process, fasting also teaches us to recognize those good things that we give up as relative goods. That is, they are things that are good in themselves, but they are not final goods, they are not the final purpose of human life. Going without them for a while helps us to recognize their proper place is a well-ordered life, especially when we are tempted to make them a bigger priority than they ought to be.

          There are a lot of ways to fast. We could fast from forms of entertainment, from social media, from electronics. But the best fasting, is fasting. Fasting, classically considered, is the act of depriving ourselves of food. The Church’s traditional definition of a day of fasting is one full meal, with two light meals at other points in the day (the two light meals (or “collations,” the technical term – really more like a snack), the two of them combined being less than the main meal), and no eating in between meals). This fasting is obligatory on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday for all Catholics aged 18-59, along with abstinence from meat for those aged 14 and up on these days and all Fridays of Lent (pregnant and nursing mothers and the infirm excepted). Catholic moralists generally agree that these precepts bind under pain of mortal sin.

          The Church’s disciple used to be much stricter, though. Not long ago, fasting and partial abstinence (meaning only the main meal may have meat) was obligatory Monday – Saturday of Lent, on the eve of most feast days (including Christmas Eve), and on quarterly penitential mini-seasons called Ember Days. Most Catholics seem unaware that the precept of abstinence from meat on all Fridays of the year except for Solemnities actually still binds under pain of at least venial sin – it can just be substituted by another penance now outside Lent.

          Why this insistence on fasting? And why would we say that the best fasting is fasting? Wouldn’t abstaining from things like social media be even better for us than fasting from food? In the short term, yes, almost certainly. But traditional fasting is effective like nothing else in the foundational task of forming desire.

           People generally don’t come to believe in Christ or in His Church because they’ve been intellectually convinced. Even the most intellectual of converts, the ones who’ve “read their way into the Church” (and I know plenty of them!), often wait a long time on the doorstep, convinced in their heads, but still missing something in their hearts. We strive to provide the strongest possible intellectual formation in the principles of the faith to our children and young people. But they also don’t keep coming back primarily because they were convinced in the head.

          American Catholicism in the 20^th Century recognized that head knowledge and especially rote memorization were not sufficient for catechesis. So we tried to go for people’s hearts. This effort, many people have observed, generally didn’t work, because it made emotional appeals that were insufficiently grounded in truth. In recent years, there have been fantastic initiatives especially in the United States to restore solid intellectual content and grounding to Catholic formation of young people and adults. We’ve found a better balance of heart and head.

          But something is still missing. And I’d call that missing part the gut. The gut is our instincts, our deepest existential commitments, that deep-seated part of you. It’s our gut responses that reveal so much about our character. The gut is desire.

          Scientists increasingly recognize that popular wisdom is not wrong to recognize this part of our bodies – the gut – as central to much more than just digestion. Google “gut health and mental health” and you will see results from Harvard, Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, and Johns Hopkins – it’s not fringy. I’m convinced that what we need more of in Christian formation is not just more head or more heart, or a better balance of head and heart. We need more gut.

          Needing more gut is the big reason why I am so passionate about beauty in the Sacred Liturgy. Beauty in the liturgy – in the music we sing, in the vestments and vessels used at the altar, in our postures, our words, our engagement with the Sacred through all five senses – forms desire and longing. We celebrate the mysteries of the Christian faith in a way that evokes mystery because we are meant to be left with a certain longing and yearning for something that we touched, but remained elusive.

          That aspect of gut is meant to echo out of the encounter with Christ in the Eucharist into the rest of our lives. It means greater feasting when the Church urges us to rejoice, which builds up the desire to rejoice, even to revel in, the goodness of what God has done for us in giving us His Son, His Mother, His saints. And it means building up even more hunger in that gut when the Church urges us to fast. Fasting from social media or electronics might be very good for you, but it won’t leave you with the constant desire in the pit of your human nature like fasting does.

          We began Lent by praying on Ash Wednesday: “Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service, so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.” Christian iconography portrays the weapons of Christ – the arma Christi. What are His weapons? They are the instruments of His Passion – transformed by His willing sacrifice from instruments of torture into His weapons with which He goes into battle for us.

          So just as the instruments of the Passion are the arma Christi, the weapons of Christ, you must arm yourself with “weapons of self-restraint.” How does fasting help you combat evil? Fasting brings peace to our disordered desires. That might not be evident at first, because at first all you can think about is how hungry you are, and you become irritable. But persevere. Don’t give up because it’s tough. It’s supposed to be tough. “He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over, he was hungry.” It’s the most obvious thing in the world that He was hungry, but St. Luke tells us that to emphasize that it wasn’t a mistake.

          If you’re used to a couple drinks before going to bed, to help you wind down, it might be difficult to fall asleep at first without the alcohol-induced tiredness. But then you get over that hump, and you start sleeping better, because alcohol reduces the quality of your sleep (popular wisdom turns out to be wrong on that one). Likewise, when you persevere through the initial difficulty of fasting, you’ll notice a sharpness and attentiveness, especially when you give time to the Lord in prayer.

          An added benefit of fasting for me has been learning to question narratives presented by unreliable sources. A bag of trail mix told me, “Let’s face it, three meals a day doesn’t cut it anymore!” Really? My life is so strenuous that three meals a day won’t cut it? I can’t imagine how my ancestors who did backbreaking labor on the farm survived without Keto trail mix. Life has gotten less strenuous, not more. We all complain about the rising cost of groceries. But how much of that is because of all the snack food we buy?

          Fasting also means eating and living in solidarity with the poor. Not just giving money to help the poor, but actually living like them. Most of the world survives on rice, beans, lentils, and other basic grains. I wrote most of my thesis while staying at a Franciscan convent. There was no internet to distract me, but the simplicity of the life there also gave me a sharpness and focus. In the tiny guest dining room, with a spartan table and wooden chair, the cloistered nuns passed food through a revolving turnstile. It was almost always bowls of lentils and loaves of bread. You were lucky if you could heat a room there to 63 degrees. In the simplicity and intensity of that life, there was peace, focus, an attentiveness to God.

          We live in a frictionless world, in which the satisfaction of desire is never more than a couple of taps away. And the result is that we are completely bored – bored with the most exciting entertainment and most beautiful bodies ever offered.

          The great modern sin, I’m convinced, is the sin of sloth. Sloth is not just laziness. It is sorrow in the face of the good. Sloth is deadly because it keeps us from God, it keeps us from pursuing what is most important of all. It makes us sad when what we ought to strive for seems too far away.

          And what do we do when we’re sad. Lots of things, sure. Some people seek drugs and alcohol, some seek false representations of physical love, some seek gossip and backbiting. But almost all of us eat. We eat to fill the void left by the sadness of failing to strive for the good that God has for us.

          This is why the best fasting, is fasting. The Church’s traditional Lenten fasting discipline, one meal a day, every weekday of Lent other than the Church’s established feasts, taps into the missing part, the gut, and moves us to desire, to desire what is good. Only with that desire can we overcome the evil of sloth, the sadness in the face of the good, only with that desire do we know and live into the reality that “One does not live on bread alone.”

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

I Sunday of Lent, A.D. MMXXV