So why are we so fixated on fasting, abstaining, giving stuff up?
We often we hear that the important thing is not to give something up, but to do something positive. But it’s strange, isn’t it, that the feeling still sticks that Lent is really about giving up stuff?
Giving up chocolate, giving up alcohol, giving up desserts, giving up cigarettes, giving up TV, giving up meat on Fridays…. For better or worse, we tend to ask ourselves not ‘What am I going to do, in a positive way, for Lent?’ but ‘What am I going to give up?’
The way of asceticism
‘There are only two philosophies of life,’ Fulton J. Sheen once said, ‘one is first the feast and then the headache; the other is first the fast and then the feast.’ Today, more than ever, the time is ripe for a recovery and renewal of this second ‘philosophy,’ the way of asceticism.
At a surface level, asceticism (the constellation of the practices of voluntary self-denial such as fasting from food) does not hold much attraction for us today. In the film version of The Da Vinci Code, the crazy and murderous albino monk, Silas is depicted whipping himself and wearing a chain wrapped around his leg that he tightens so as to draw his own blood. What such a picture conveys is fanaticism, self-hatred and a religious practice divorced from all that is holy, healthy and good.
Yet there are numerous signs in our culture today that, at a deeper level, there is a desire for a freeing asceticism, … Read the full article: The Virtue of Aceticism
Acknowledgement
Photo: Ashley Rose @flickr.com