Today, Ash Wednesday, the annual Christian fasting season known as Lent begins. Most great world religions have an annual fasting season. The Christian one lasts for forty days and significantly coincides with spring. There are many reasons why it is good to have a fasting season. Let me mention a few.
It offers us an opportunity to start again, to make a new beginning. Failing and falling are part of the human condition. In the Christian view of life failing and falling should never be a cause for despondency or despair. The God of Jesus is a God of abundant mercy and radical forgiveness, a God who wipes out past failures and invites us to make a fresh start. We should never be reluctant to begin again. New beginnings are a necessary part of the Christian journey.
Lent is also an ideal time to restore the balance in our lives. Virtue is the happy medium, the golden mean. But the golden mean is hard to achieve. There is a tendency in human nature to over indulge, to develop addictions, to abuse our bodies, to become overly preoccupied with work, to neglect important relationships, to put too much emphasis on our material needs and not enough on our emotional and spiritual needs. Lent provides us with an opportunity to reintroduce a healthy diet; a healthy diet of food, of exercise, of relaxation, of prayer. Restoring the balance in our lives helps us to sort out what is good for us and what is bad for us.
Lent is the Christian fasting season which means that it should be focused on Jesus who is the Christ. There is really only one yardstick with which to measure the success of our Lenten fasting: Does it enable us to become more like Jesus? The goal of Lent is to get rid of the ‘old man’ which is the selfish me and to put on the ‘New Man’ which is the loving Christ. Ultimately, Lent is about Jesus, not about us. It is about Jesus’ vision of life, his values and the building of his Kingdom in the world. Therefore the best type of fasting we can do in Lent is the fasting that helps us to pay greater attention to Jesus and move closer to him.