Fasting, alms and prayer — the meaning of Lenten observance
Sarah Wells
Contributor
Ash Wednesday is coming up on Feb. 18 and there is much to be gleaned from our Church’s tradition on the origins of the ashes and the gift of fasting. It is in the beginning, in the garden of Eden, where we find the first example of God’s commandment to fast. In the fourth century, St. Basil the Great wrote in his First Homily on Fasting that “Fasting is as old as mankind itself … If Eve had fasted from the tree, we would not have to keep this fast now,” referring to the Lenten fast.
After Genesis, we find myriad instances of fasting, accompanied by the donning of sackcloth and ashes. Having been humbled by God, Job admits, “Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:6) The prophet Daniel interceded for the people of Israel saying, “I turned to the Lord God, to seek help, in prayer and petition, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.” (Daniel 9:3) In preparation for battle, the Israelites “fasted and wore sackcloth; they sprinkled ashes on their heads and tore their garments.” (1 Mac 3:47) Hearing the news that a massacre of the Jews would be carried out by the king, “Queen Esther, seized with mortal anguish, fled to the Lord for refuge. Taking off her splendid garments, she put on garments of distress and mourning. In place of her precious ointments, she covered her head with dung and ashes. She afflicted her body severely and in place of her festive adornments, her tangled hair covered her” (Esther 4:12-13).
In these instances, we see individuals as well as communities fasting, all marked by ashes. We emulate our forebears in faith with the ashes we receive on Ash Wednesday, which signify the beginning of a public, communal fast by the whole Church. Ashes are a sign of petition for a specific cause and sign of conviction to the world.
Around the eighth century, it was only public sinners and the dying who received ashes. To the dying, a priest would say, “Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return.” He sprinkled the person with holy water and asked, “Art thou content with sackcloth and ashes in testimony of thy penance before the Lord in the day of judgment?” To which the person replied, “I am content.”
At the start of the eleventh century, an Anglo-Saxon priest named Aelfric preached, “We read in the books both in the Old Law and in the New that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth. Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we strew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.”
In 1091, Pope Urban II established the universal practice of distributing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful at the beginning of Lent.
Why fast? Why give alms? Why pray? We do these things in hopes of emptying ourselves, to become poor in spirit, to depend upon God alone. To acquire sanctity in this world, one must fight and suffer for it. Our fasts bring this truth to the front of our minds.
St. Basil continues, “Remember the saints of old, ‘Of whom the world was not worthy, who went around in sheepskins, in goatskins, destitute, persecuted, mistreated.’ Remember their mode of life, if indeed you are seeking after the same inheritance as them.”
These practices restore dignity to our souls through the acquisition of self-control, leading to self-mastery. It is only through submission to God that man becomes master of himself, just as Adam submitted to God and received dominion over all of Eden. We still retain that commandment of dominion, but now we must overcome our inclination to sin in order to live it out.
Deacon James Keating, of the St. Paul Center, captures the nature of sin as he writes, “Sin pathologically clings only to the endless boredom of repetitive daily features of the interior life: constant rehearsal of our sinfulness, continued recollection of personal inadequacies, denigrating thoughts about the imperfections of neighbors, resentment toward the mundane horarium of each day, bathing in negative thoughts and moods, existing in cynicism and all manners of interior desires bent on disorder, greed, lust, envy, pride, sloth, anger, and gluttony. All of these desires weigh us down from within” (from his article The Healing Power of the Eucharist).
To fast is to be ripped out of this cycle. That is why we fast on each Friday of the year, not just during Lent (Code of Canon Law 1250-1253). Through deliberate hunger, the surrender of our income to causes outside of ourselves, and the quieting of our own thoughts to be present to God in prayer, we mature in our faith. We move from spiritual immaturity, which keeps us in a cycle of grasping for instant gratification, to spiritual maturity, a place of inner freedom where the soul lives out the truth that its deepest need is God. Through these practices of self-emptying, man regains his original dignity and set on the path toward God.
Sarah Wells is pastoral associate at the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, Covington. This article was first published in the parish’s Gargoyle Gazette and has been reprinted with permission.
