This Is The Fasting I Desire

Every night baby William and I contend together as to whether I'll put him down or he'll put me down. He wins most of the time -- he has cuteness and the baby sleep waves on his side, while I am weighed down by thirty extra pounds of quotidian grind. This, as you may have noticed, cuts into my writing time. William is content to let me sit in front of the computer as long as I'm nursing him. This literally cramps my style -- the weird contortions of wrist and spine necessary to type while a baby is attached to your breast just aren't conducive to the free play of imagination.

And I'm not sitting in front of the computer much since giving up Facebook for Lent. This is not just as a negative result of the sacrifice (which scarcely impinges on me, to tell the truth), but as a result of the positive effort to reform my schedule and put my vocation first. I'm seeing the first promising buds of springtime inside and out as bits of my daily life are gradually coming back into a small sort of order, and though it's a continuing process of dying to self, I want that order to spread and grow.

These fruits seem to be the result of an odd fast -- a fast from reading and writing. As I've given up reading all but a few essential blogs and a few essential books, and given up writing almost all together,  both my prayer life and my home life have been strengthened. I can't undertake a strenuous fast from food this Lent while I'm nursing the ravenous beast (three months today!) but God seems to be giving me a different fasting from overconsumption. I'm trying to accept this by taking my different evening time as a gift instead of a frustrating battle to get the baby down so I can write.

Psalm 40, from today's mass readings, says that God doesn't not require sacrifice and holocausts, but a heart open to do His will. The holocausts were the required offering, much as fasting from food is during Lent. But I can't follow the required fast, so God has given me a different fast from writing and reading, and in following it I myself become writing and reading: "“See; I come with an inscribed scroll written upon me. I delight to do your will, my God; your law is in my inner being!” (Ps. 40: 7-8)

ADDENDUM: Fr. Barron on fasting as distancing yourself from a good thing to allow deeper hungers to emerge.

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Intertwined with all this is my effort to say the rosary daily. I'm following The Rosary: 31 Days, 31 Ways (recommended to me in the comments by Angelico Nguyen of The Korrectiv), and also reading along with Enbrethiliel's Book Club posts on The Secret of the Rosary by St. Louis de Montfort. In keeping with the theme of putting work into my actions, I'm trying hard to meditate on the mysteries when I pray them, instead of just rattling through the decades, and I'm also trying hard to let that meditation turn into prayer instead remaining just a novel I write in my head.

Today is the feast of the Annunciation, so here's my meditation on the first decade of the Joyful Mysteries:

When Mary says to the angel, "How can this be, since I do not know man?", the angel tells her not to be afraid and speaks comforting words about how nothing is impossible with God. However, just a few verses earlier in Luke, Zechariah asks almost exactly the same question about how his wife Elizabeth can be pregnant in her old age, and the angel rebukes him and strikes him dumb. Why is Zechariah punished for questioning while Mary is commended? Well, Mary is asking how the impossible can occur. She is a virgin, and she isn't getting married that day, and she knows that God is not asking her to go out and sin to get pregnant. It's a fair question, and the angel answers it seriously. In Zechariah's case, he's married. As long as he and Elizabeth are having sex, they're performing the creative act that brings children into the world, even though they've been infertile until now. John the Baptist's conception isn't a miracle. A couple getting pregnant when they have sex is not a miracle -- it's merely God willing nature to work as He intended it. Jesus's conception is a miracle, a physical impossibility -- a virgin conceiving and bearing a child through no human agency.

One hears the example of infertile couples raised when the discussion turns to the procreative nature of sex, or the natural barrenness of homosexual relations. But the act of sex is how God wills children to enter the world, and He wills to honor biology, whether a man or woman is married or not, fertile or not, contracepting or not. As long as a man and woman are having sex, natural conception is not impossible, whether or not a couple has been trying for years or are having sex for the first time.

I think this mystery also speaks to the immorality of creating babies outside of natural conception. A child has a right to be conceived as the fruit of sex between his or her father or mother. The child also has the right to be conceived into a family, to married parents who have vowed to accept him or her. Any aberration in this -- fornication, rape, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy -- is a violation of the rights of the child. (So is abortion: you don't correct one violation of the child's rights -- conception through rape or fornication, for example -- through violating another right by killing the baby.) If God desires that conception happen outside the natural act of sex in marriage, He doesn't require the agency of man and a lab to make it happen, and He pays the mother the respect of asking her first by sending an angel to make a formal announcement and request.

True Penance

Up from the comments: Mandamum sends a quote from St. Josemaria Escriva which is just what I needed to hear today:


"Penance is fulfilling exactly the timetable you have fixed for yourself, even though your body resists or your mind tries to avoid it by dreaming up useless fantasies. Penance is getting up on time and also not leaving for later, without any real reason, that particular job that you find harder or most difficult to do.

"Penance is knowing how to reconcile your duties to God, to others and to yourself, by making demands on yourself so that you find enough time for each of your tasks. You are practicing penance when you lovingly keep to your schedule of prayer, despite feeling worn out, listless or cold.

"Penance means being very charitable at all times towards those around you, starting with the members of your own family. It is to be full of tenderness and kindness towards the suffering, the sick and the infirm. It is to give patient answers to people who are boring and annoying. It means interrupting our work or changing our plans, when circumstances make this necessary, above all when the just and rightful needs of others are involved.

"Penance consists in putting up with the thousand and one little pinpricks of each day; in not abanoning your job, although you have momentarily lost the enthusiasm with which you started it; in eating gladly whatever is served, without being fussy.

"For parents and, in general, for those whose work involves supervision or teaching, penance is to correct whenever it is necessary. This should be done bearing mind the type of fault committed and the situation of the person who needs to be so helped, not letting oneself be swayed by subjective viewpoints, which are often cowardly and sentimental.

"A spirit of penance keeps us from becoming too attached to the vast imaginative blueprints we have made for our future projects, where we have already foreseen our master strokes and brilliant successes. What joy we give to God when we are happy to lay aside our third-rate painting efforts and let him put in the features and colors of his choice!"

The Ongoing Lent

I gave up Facebook for Lent and find, as I found last Lent, that it's surprisingly easy to go cold turkey -- so easy, in fact, that I feel, as I felt last year, that perhaps it was the wrong sacrifice. And yet, my days haven't become more productive, exactly, and I wonder what spiritual benefit I'm accruing, if any. Or is the point of Lent to accrue spiritual benefit, or is that a secondary effect of drawing closer to God? Am I even drawing closer to God? Lent is actually very much like ordinary life, in fact, in which no bright lights signal my spiritual path, no voices guide me, and as usual, I have to rely on my own discernment.

I've realized that the reason I'm not more productive even though I've cut out Facebook is because I was on Facebook a lot while nursing. Well, I'm still nursing a good portion of the day whether or not I'm scrolling through posts on my phone. Perhaps it would have been a more demanding sacrifice if I'd set strict limits on my browsing time. And now, since I'm not nursing in front of the computer either, I'm not reading blogs as much as I used to, and I feel like I've become oddly insular and lost my connection with the larger world, even though I still read the paper. In fact, I feel like my ability to write is slipping, in terms of focus and agility. And so I hesitate to write anything, and so skills atrophy further. Perhaps it would be a discipline to have a set amount of reading and writing time each day, but is that necessarily a spiritual discipline? Or since all aspects of life are connected, does any kind of increased discipline have a spiritual component?

Lent is, in short, a time of refinement, and I'll probably be refining my practice all the way to Holy Thursday. Something I have added is using all that nursing time to finally ready and chew on The Four Cardinal Virtues, by Josef Pieper, and in conjunction with that, to read Father Copleston's History of Philosophy, Volume 2, Part 2, on Thomas Aquinas. Pieper is drawing a great deal from the Summa in his study of virtue, and I'd like to read some of the original, but I'd like a curated introduction. Can anyone recommend a good introductory book of selections from the Summa?

I also need to refine my practice of prayer, which is currently a scattershot of intentions and unfocused meditations throughout the day. Maybe it's time to just buckle down to my stumbling block, the rosary. I can keep company with St. Therese, who said, "Reciting the Rosary costs me more than using an instrument of penance. I feel I say it so bad; in vain do I strive to meditate on the mysteries of the Rosary; I am unable to fix my attention For a long time I was sad because of this lack of devotion which surprised me, for I love the Blessed Virgin so much that it should be easy for me to say in her honor prayers which please her so much. Now, it saddens me less; I think that the Queen of Heaven being my Mother, she must see my good will and be content with it."

I hope I evince enough good will for God to be content with it! There's another goal for the rest of Lent.

"Being-for"

It turned out to be disarmingly easy to give up Facebook for Lent -- entirely too easy. I did miss, very much, the friendships I nurture through that medium, but not once was I tempted to just log on for a second to see what people were saying about XYZ. I did not miss, for a moment, the insta-dramas and controversies of the second, the snark, the memes propagated by George Takai, the political opinions, everyone's two cents on the Pope or gay marriage or gun control or grumpy cat or Downton Abbey or (spare us) Doctor Who.

In fact, it seems that my time-wasting problems run deeper than clicking around Facebook. Strangely enough, I do not get to solve my whole selfish nature with one theatrical, toothless gesture. I'm still just as capable of self-absorption even when I'm not documenting it. Not a novel or comforting revelation, perhaps, but it was helpful for me in combatting the "grand gesture" school of spirituality, or anything: If only I could do this one big thing, all else besides would fall neatly into place!

On the positive side, I worked (exceptionally slowly) through Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection over the course of the past seven weeks. Pope Benedict's writing is so richly dense that I can only read small portions at a time. By Good Friday, I was still only halfway through the book, in the chapter devoted to the Last Supper. On that day, I encountered this passage:

Now there is one further expression in Jesus' words of institution that needs to be explained, one that has been extensively debated in recent times. According to Mark and Matthew, Jesus said that his blood would be shed "for many", echoing Isaiah 53, whereas in Paul and Luke we read of the blood being given or poured out "for you". 

Recent theology has rightly underlined the use of the word "for" in all four accounts, a word that may be considered the key not only to the Last Supper accounts, but to the figure of Jesus overall. His entire being is expressed by the word "pro-existence" -- he is there, not for himself, but for others. This is not merely a dimension of his existence, but its innermost essence and its entirety. His very being is a "being-for". If we are able to grasp this, then we have truly come close to the mystery of Jesus, and we have understood what discipleship is. 

And this cuts to the heart of my spiritual malaise. My being is not, practically, a "being-for". I hoard my being, parcelling it out in tight rations. I consider myself to be my own, so that the demands of others on my time and my peace feel like intrusions or disruptions of the norm. Now, it happens that the needs or desires of others may coincide with "my" priorities -- I rarely feel it an imposition to be with Darwin, for example -- but when I find myself praying in exasperation, "Lord, deliver me from these children you've given me!" (as I did on the day Pope Francis was elected, when I just wanted to read up on his background and people were hanging on me and whining, "Mom! Mom! Mama! Moooo-mmmmeee!"), then it becomes clear that I consider my being to be not "being-for", but "being-free-from".

The other thing that is clear is that becoming a "being-for" is not a transformation I can make by my own power. By myself, I don't even want to change. I like hoarding my precious time. I like feeling self-sufficient and complete. Only the scandal and grace of Christ hanging on the cross is effective enough to peel back my veneer of competence: Christ died in agony for me not because I was kind of selfish and demanding, but because I needed his death. Not only do I have the necessity of calling on his sacrifice to help me change, but I have a right to do so. Unlike me, he welcomes importuning -- he actually likes it.

And I'm not alone in my struggle for transformation. We pray three Hail Marys every night with the children at bedtime, and as we pray I ponder the repetition. Doesn't Mary ever get tired of us asking her to pray for us sinners? Isn't it rather rude to make the same demand over and over again?

Well, no, actually. Hers is a true maternal "being-for". When I ask Mary to pray for me, I'm not imposing on her. I'm only asking of her what she's supposed to do. Jesus has charged her to intercede for us: it's her job to pray for me, for everyone! He knows that I need Mary's prayers more than my own children need my physical help, though I make of her the same demands they make of me. Feed me, mother. Change me. Pray for me.

Pruning Back

I was feeling pretty good about my decision to give up Facebook for Lent and to curtail my clicking around habit, and then the Pope announced he was going to resign, and the internet blew up. And I, like a big sucker, was sucked right back in. Ironic Catholic sums up my life with the headline Cyber Catholics Planning On Giving Up Facebook For Lent Thrown Into Existential Crisis:

New York, NY: Catholics worldwide planning on giving up social media this Lent--facebook, Twitter, and the like--are caught in an existential crisis now that Pope Benedict unexpectedly announced his resignation and the conclave to elect a new successor to St Peter will occur smack in the middle of Lent. 

"I announced it and everything," moaned Cynthia Madison, a 22 year old parishioner at St. Aloysius Church in downtown Manhattan.  "I mean, who am I supposed to get this news from now?  CNS?  EWTN?  C-freakin-NN?" 

"I have a headache," announced Gabriel Celano, another St Aloysius parishioner.  "I wanted to challenge myself and do something hard this Lent, but this is just impossible.  All my friends are vetting papabile on facebook.  I can't give that up, can I?  I mean...voice of the faithful and prayer and all that...I just...Oh man.  I really have a headache."   

"It's not technically Lent--so I'm thinking about fudging that resolve a bit," admitted Joshua Smith, a father of two from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in the Bronx.  "Maybe if I do facebook via dial up.  I think that's pretty penitential, actually."

Others, who wished not to be named, admitted that they were considering foregoing facebook but putting Whispers in the Loggia up and setting up an automatic refresh every 15 minutes. Or giving up chocolate instead.

This has been the least productive day in the history of unproductive days, though I did think, when I first heard the news, about saying a rosary -- right before I settled down to read the reax from everyone and his Vatican correspondent.

I don't want to give up the internet completely, and the good and valuable friendships that I maintain through that medium. And I know that one of the reasons I shake the mouse almost every time I walk past the computer is the desire to feel connected -- to know that my friends are out there, and that they're having good conversations, and that even if I'm not participating in those conversations I benefit from them. But Lent is the time to take even good desires and turn them toward their ultimate source, God. To be honest, though, even my good yearning for companionship grows numb and is deadened when it is degraded into an endless longing for novelty and distraction. I'm reminded of what C.S. Lewis says in The Screwtape Letters of pleasures becoming tired habits:

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." The Christians describe the Enemy as one "without whom Nothing is strong".  And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that eh does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

It's time to prune back drastically, before the pruning is done for me.

I suspect, actually, that this minor sacrifice may improve the quality of what time I do spend on the internet in Lent, as well as forcing me to concentrate my ever-wandering attention and to keep from even being tempted to be caught up in any drama du jour without first considering what I say. Maybe I'll actually turn out installments of Stillwater more than once ever three weeks without the option of clicking around the moment I feel stuck. What I really want, though, is for my longing for companionship to be subsumed into a longing for God, so that I may be more fully present in everything I do, whether in person or online (but not on Facebook, for Lent).

Still wondering what sacrifices you can make for Lent, especially if your life, like mine, is pretty easy? Bearing has an excellent and substantive post on taking up your cross.

Looking Back at Lent: Why Do Penance?

Thinking back over Lent, one of the things that hits me, as it has before, is that I am much better at not doing things for Lent than doing things. Even moderately big changes in my daily routine such as "fasting" by having only one meal a day on Wednesdays and Fridays, or abstaining from alcohol entirely, are fairly doable. However, my resolutions to start each day be reading Morning Prayer, or reading the Pope's second volume of Jesus of Nazareth, or blogging my way through all of Augustine's Confessions -- not so much.

That's the point at which I find myself wondering: Is putting so much focus into not doing something a mistake? There is, after all, nothing wrong with eating, or with having my nightly beer or glass of wine. Why should God have any interest in my not doing these perfectly acceptable things? It's not as if God gets satisfaction out of thinking, "Ah, it's Lent. I do so look forward to all those little human creatures going in for a little bit of voluntary discomfort. I thrive on discomfort."

So why give up a few pleasures for Lent -- especially while at the same time failing in doing some positive things which would arguably be better things to do?

Well, obviously, the reason for penance is not that God wants us to be miserable.

Fasting on (Liquid) Bread and Water

Many of the great ales of Europe originate in monastic breweries, and one of the purposes of those thick, malty brews was to help sustain the monks through periods of fasting. Odd as drinking beer while fasting may sound to modern American ears, when beer is seen mostly as a recreational drink, beer was drunk daily (often even at breakfast) in the pre-modern world as a nourishing and relatively disease-free quaff rather than an intoxicant. (Though goodness knows, a slight buzz doubtless brightened the day of many a peasant when the beer barrels were full. You need to find your job perks where they are.)

Homebrewer and beer-blogger J Wilson is tapping-into this tradition by setting out to fast on beer and water for the entirety of Lent this year, drinking a doppelbock modeled on German brews that originated in monasteries. (The most widely available of these is Pauliner's Salvator) You can follow his project at Diary of a Part-Time Monk.

The Comforts and Fears of Legalism

Quite some time ago, a good friend said something along these lines to me:

"I've been trying really hard to defeat spiritual legalism. When I think about sin legalistically, I'm constantly terrified that I've committed a mortal sin recently which I haven't confessed, and that if something were to happen to me I'd be damned instantly. I try to remember that if at the personal judgment I truly embrace God, He won't turn away from me."

I think this is certainly a valid way of thinking about things from a Catholic perspective, and I don't want to speak against it, but it did strike me as a very foreign viewpoint when I heard it. Foreign to my own experience, that is.

You see, my experience is pretty much the opposite: As someone who seldom feels a strong relationship with God, I find the idea that when I've gone to confession my sins really are forgiven, whether I feel like it or not, very comforting. On the other hand, relying entirely on the idea that when faced with the full experience of God I would unhesitatingly rush to him is, for me, a little terrifying. Unhesitating rushing is not something I'm known for. I'm not the rushing type. The idea of being face to face with God is more than a little terrifying for me -- as perhaps it should be.

As such, I find a more traditional (some would say: dour) approach to Lent intensely comforting, as opposed to the "this is a great time to work on your relationship with God" approach. Even in my married life, I'm not sure how you "work on your relationship" -- but I do know how to say "I love you", spend time talking together, go on a date, or buy a present. Similarly, I don't know how to "work on my relationship with God", but if fasting, prayer and alms-giving are what builds our relationship with Him, those I know how to do.

How Dry I Am

As I wrestle in my mind with whether St. Patrick's day is sufficient cause to take a day off my alcohol fast, it seems a reasonable enough time to put down a few thoughts on the project.

Last year, as I was trying to think of something improving to do for Lent, I told myself: "It would, of course, be completely impossible to give up coffee or alcohol. I need those."

As soon as I said it, however, I realized I didn't like the sound of that "need". So alcohol it was. (I'm willing to admit needing coffee, but having 1-2 drinks a day is something I'd rather "enjoy" than "need".)

Last year it was moderately hard. The point I get home from work tends to also be the point when the dinner prep/hungry child cacophony reaches fever pitch, and daddy Darwin likes his chance to pour a glass of beer or wine and try to slow down a little from 9-12 hours of coffee and multi-tasking. Giving it up required me to work harder to remain patient while listening to the cares of two or three high pitched voices talking rapidly and simultaneously. And yet it was, when I put my mind to it, eminently doable. And in a sense liberating to recall that one does not "need" these sorts of things.

I took the same discipline this year, but found quickly that although I went straight back to having 1-2 drinks most evening after last lent, the detachment had remained. It's been oddly easy to give up alcohol this year. Sure, I'd enjoy having a drink of an evening, but there's no longer any sense of "needing" just of "enjoying".

This is, perhaps, a terribly trivial example, but it seems to me that this detachment from material things is one of the disciplines we see encouraged again and again in the Bible. In the most extreme example: Job has a great many of the things which people consider to make life worth living: home, wealth, family, respect, social standing, etc. Yet he's called to remain faithful to God even when all these cans can be, and indeed are, taken away.

And this is, I think, why we're called as Christians to engage in fasting during certain times of the year. Going without food for most of the day is something we can sustain, though it takes concentration and is not enjoyable. And the discipline helps us recall our ownership over ourselves -- something which we must often achieve in subtler circumstances in order to obey God's laws. Finally, in this affluent place and time in which far more people are afflicted with obesity than hunger, fasting is a reminder that we came into this world with nothing, and with nothing we shall leave it. All that we have may vanish, yet we ourselves, not our possessions, are what have moral and human dignity are are loved by God.

Halftime Report

So Lent is just about at the halfway mark, and I was sitting back and congratulating myself. "I'm not doing too badly," I thought. "It actually hasn't been that hard to get up early and say morning prayer." And upon further reflection I realized: it's not been that hard because I haven't been doing it. Not consistently, that is, and not early enough to be a true sacrifice. I kind of roll over when Darwin's alarm goes off (which isn't at the same time every morning, and to which sound I have a strong immunity from years of ignoring it), and if I shake myself enough, I reach for the prayerbook and say Morning Prayer nestled under the covers snuggled up with baby. (Well, he's gotta eat, doesn't he?) And a few times, I've fallen back asleep altogether. All in all, a rather cushy Lenten gig.

But: Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation! I still have the second half of Lent to make things right. New Lenten practice: to get my own alarm clock, get up at the same (early) time every morning, and say Morning Prayer sitting up. Not in bed.