Lent 2020: What Is the Point of Prayer?

You can't always get what you want,
But if you try sometime, you just might find
You get what you need.
~ English philosophers Jagger and Richards

Today's readings are a challenge for me. In one, Queen Esther feels alone and in anguish but trusts that God will hear her prayer to protect her and her people in the face of their enemies. Then in the Book of Matthew, Jesus tells us:

"Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives, and the one who seeks, finds. And to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which one of you would hand his son a stone when he asked for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asked for a fish? If you, then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him?"

In everyday real life, we know that things don't always work out the way we want when we pray. And there's the catch, the unspoken subtext in Jesus' words. Prayer isn't just about asking for what we want, because God already knows what he wants for our lives. And sometimes what he wants and what we want are in conflict. And that means that sometimes the answer to our prayers is "No."

In a self-absorbed culture where we've grown accustomed to getting what we want when we want it, this can be a difficult idea to accept. But truly, it's not always about us. Prayer is not about rubbing a magic lamp and getting a wish from a genie. It's about understanding what God wants for our life.

This can be a painful lesson to learn. When I was a teenager, I began experiencing debilitating panic attacks. They could last for days, even weeks. The panic would rise up and I'd feel dizzy and sweaty. My vision would go blurry and my heart would race. I'd pace the floor on sleepless nights. I thought I was going to die. Sometimes the attacks would subside, but I'd wait anxiously for the next wave to hit, because it always would.

I was diagnosed many years later with panic disorder -- a situation in which one has panic attacks out of the context of anything that would actually cause panic. My neurons were misfiring, sending my autonomic nervous system into fight-or-flight response.

Decades later, my autonomic nervous system seems to still be malfunctioning, only now in ways that affect some of my body's physical functions. Many tests, procedures, and medications later, no one has ever been able to tell me what's wrong. This is the daily hell of living in my body. It is apparently my cross to bear in this life.

Now, anyone who's ever had panic attacks knows how terrifying they are, not to mention how debilitating. And when you're a teenager, when your body is young and supposed to still be functioning normally, you can't understand why your body is rebelling against you. You worry about your future, your ability to live an independent life -- or your ability to live at all.

My parents were never much help. My mom thought I should just "snap out of it." And so when doctors and their meds failed to help, I did the only other thing I could think of to do. I prayed.

Despite being the first Catholic converts in their families, my parents brought over a lot of their evangelical Protestant backgrounds with them -- and as a result, our TV was quite often tuned to watch the televangelists on the local religious channel. The ones who would have you put your hand up against theirs on the screen and pray to God for healing. The preacher would randomly announce that God was telling him a girl in Nebraska was being healed right this moment of her disease. I prayed that one day the preacher would say that a young man in Michigan was being healed of his panic attacks. I begged God for that to happen. I spent more than one night on my hands and knees, tears streaming down my face, as I pleaded for God to have mercy on me and fix my body.

But relief never came. My prayers went unanswered.

Or did they?

At the time, I felt abandoned by a God who didn't care. Over the next few years, the experience led me to the conclusion that belief in God was superstitious bullshit. And although I still felt drawn toward the spiritual life, I put my childhood beliefs behind me and set out for the East, looking for something that made my suffering make more sense. Buddhism was that place for many years. But a confluence of events later in life led me back to where I started, though it took me a few more years of hard discernment and soul-searching to be able to come back.

The only way I could come back was with a deeper understanding of what the idea of God in the tradition of my youth was really all about. I had to look deeper, beneath the surface literal meanings I was raised to believe in. And it was there that things began to open up to me and finally make sense. And one of the things that suddenly took on much more clarity was the purpose and power of prayer.

It finally occurred to me that prayer isn't about putting in a coin and making a wish. It's about conforming ourselves to God's will for our lives. Ask and you shall receive, Jesus says, but what he doesn't say is that you won't necessarily receive what you want. The whole point is to let go of what we want and to have faith in God's plans for our lives. We may not understand God's plans. We might not even like them. But that's not our call. It never was. We don't control the fate of our lives. We have the free will to make choices, of course, but we're not going to alter the divine plans that are written down in our Book of Life.

"The prayer of a righteous man avails much," says James, and maybe that's so. Maybe God grants what we ask for if we have the right people on board with us. But even if so, we're still only being granted what God had in mind for us all along. We can't change God's mind. It just doesn't work that way. All we really can do is say, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his death, "Not my will but yours be done."

Of course, this sends us deep into the ethical and theological thicket of why a loving God allows people to suffer. I don't have a good answer for that, and I don't know that any theologian ever has come up with a satisfactory answer. The Buddhists might say that we're working off the karma of a past life. The Catholics would talk about redemptive suffering, passing through the purifying fires of our trials and tribulations, to humble us, to remind us that we're not in charge and never were. Even that is a somewhat unsatisfying answer, but for me it works better than any other answer I've encountered.

I think this is why the Orthodox idea of theosis is so attractive to me. If the purpose of our religious and spiritual life is to take up our cross daily and become more like Christ, to "become by grace what God is by nature," in the words of St. Athanasius, then maybe suffering finds a purpose. I know my suffering has humbled me, and maybe that's the point of it. I still have a long way to go, as I pass through the refiner's fire of this life -- but maybe this life is just the beginning of the process. Maybe theosis continues when we leave this body. For me, that's another way of looking at Purgatory. We have to be cleansed and purified before we can enter the presence of God.

If so, then let the purgation continue. My challenge is to not lose faith in the process. It's the challenge laid before all of us who believe even when our suffering seems to make no sense. May we all persevere and run the race to the end.

Lent 2020: "They Look, but They Don't See"

"This generation is an evil generation."

How those words from Jesus ring loud and clear across the centuries. Can there be any doubt that a people who call themselves Christians, yet scoff at the poor, the homeless, the hungry, and the migrant and cheer on war and the eye-for-eye retribution of the death penalty, foster evil in their hearts? They preach Christ but do not do what he says.

Some things never change, alas, and Jesus rebuked the people who wanted a sign from God before they would humbly change their ways and believe. Jesus likens the crowds before him to the people of Nineveh, who repented when they heard Jonah preaching to them -- yet the crowds gathered around Jesus had "one greater than Jonah" before them, and still they stubbornly clung to their ways.

We might chuckle at the prideful hard-headedness of the crowds assembled before Jesus, wondering how they could fail to see what was right before their eyes. Yet if Jesus came back to the world today, preaching his same Gospel in defense of the weak and powerless and challenging the violence of the ruling authorities and the hypocrisy of the religious leaders, do we seriously think most right-wing evangelical Christians would rush to embrace him? If the current tone of the U.S. political discussion is any indication, his loudest followers would deride him as a socialist and an enabler of lazy freeloaders.

Just last night I encountered someone on social media who said real Christians would never support Bernie Sanders because Paul said that if you don't work, you don't eat. What do you even say to such hardness of heart, such blindness to the mercy and charity Jesus preaches all throughout the four Gospels? The point isn't that Bernie Sanders represents the teachings of Christ -- though he comes a lot closer than most of those on the political right -- but that when you have laid plainly out before you, in sacred scripture, Jesus' admonition to embrace the poor, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, the powerless, the forgotten, and all those on the margins of society, and then you bash the same people he told you to embrace, then you aren't getting it any more than the crowds gathered before Jesus did.

Granted, sometimes people need a sign to help them sort out their way in life. I wandered through the spiritual desert for a good 15 years before I could come back home to my Christian roots with a new and deeper understanding of the heart of the Gospel. And I couldn't have done it without a sign from Blessed Mother Mary. Hers is the only obvious sign I've ever received in all my years of searching, and her message to me, without speaking a word, was very clear, in regard to the love that awaited me and where she wanted me to be. So I don't discount the importance of embracing our spiritual intuition that might just give us a nudge when we need it. The problem is when the signs are clear and we ignore them. Sure, sometimes we simply don't notice them, but often we simply choose not to listen because our own pride makes us want to ignore any uncomfortable prodding from the Spirit that we might need to reassess and change our ways.

And changing our ways is what the Lenten season is all about. It's our chance to do some hard self-examination, reset, pick up our cross, and do the will of God: act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord.

Lent 2020: Forgiveness Is a Two-Way Street

In today's Gospel reading from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches The Lord's Prayer. It's one of the prayers most common to all flavors of Christianity, from Catholic to Orthodox, liberal to evangelical. Almost all Christians know it and say it.

The question is, do we really take it to heart? Because it not only humbles us before God, but it also expects something of us in return.

First, "thy will be done." We sometimes turn to God in prayer to get something we want. Yet God is not a wish-granting genie, and the purpose of prayer, at its core, is to conform ourselves to God's will. We're not going to change God's mind by asking super-extra nice. It doesn't work that way. What will be, will be. Even Jesus, praying with all his might in the Garden of Gethsemane the evening before his death, ended his supplication by saying "yet not my will but yours be done."

Second, "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Most of us are probably eager to embrace the first part of that line, but maybe not so much the second part. And if that weren't hard enough, Jesus doubles down immediately after teaching the Lord's Prayer and tells the assembled crowd: "If you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions." What he's asking us to see is that God made forgiveness a two-way street. He will freely forgive us, but only if we also forgive others.

God's not being an unreasonable, crotchety old meanie here. He wants us to humble ourselves, to empty ourselves of our need to be right, to hold grudges, to refuse to mend wounds and move on. We can't come to him full of the idea that we're in the right. We have to come to him with the humility of one who recognizes that he's in charge, not us. We don't call the shots, as much as we might like to think we do. Just as we'll be judged to the same extent we judge others, so we will be forgiven to the extent we forgive others.

So how the heck do we do that? It's not easy by any means. I ought to know, because I used to be a notorious grudge-holder. No one could hold a grudge like me. I'd hold on to things literally for years. And I absolutely refused to back down. If I did, I felt like I was letting the other person get away with being wrong. I was caving in. And my ego simply wouldn't allow that.

Then I got older, and maybe a tad bit wiser. I had a kid, which changes your perspective. And I got sick, which has a way of softening you and rearranging your priorities. I realized that I wasn't gaining anything by insisting on being right. No one but me cared about how, in my stubbornness, I clung to "the principle of the matter." I just decided to let things go. More importantly, I was able to see that I wasn't always in the right. My ego had always insisted on saying that the other person was in the wrong. But maybe, I realized, that wasn't always true. Maybe sometimes I was the bad guy.

I still struggle with all this at times, but I do think I'm better than I used to be. Nowadays, if someone annoys me or wrongs me, I do my best not to hold on to it. I overlook it and get over it, or, if the person has a history of being toxic, I'll just cut them out of my life, wish them well, and move on. I'm certainly not going to let them live rent-free in my head, which is what I did for years with those whom I felt had wronged me in some way. Why do that? Just move on.

Sometimes, people criticize this aspect of the Christian walk, especially those who have suffered abuse at the hands of another. And I totally get that, as someone who was abused as a child. If you forgive an abuser, aren't you just enabling the abuser, and telling him that what he did to you was OK? Aren't you saying, in a sense, that you deserved the abuse?

Well, this is a topic I don't take lightly by any means. I completely understand why abuse victims would suffer to forgive. But the lesson I learned was that forgiveness doesn't have to mean "what you did to me was OK." To me, it means looking deeply into the abuser's brokenness, and working to understand what it is inside that person that makes them think it's OK to mistreat another human being. What experiences created that person? Because it's obvious that there's something wrong with someone who resorts to abuse. Maybe they were never taught empathy. Maybe they're struggling with mental illness. Maybe they themselves were abused, and abuse is simply a learned behavior for them. Maybe they're so angry with themselves that they take their anger out on others. Whatever it is, the abuse comes from a place of disorder or pain, and it's that which we can have mercy and pity on, if we struggle with forgiving the person or their actions.

That's how I moved past my many years of anger at my abuser. I was able to separate myself from the abuse and look at what caused her to be an abuser. I know that she was a very unhappy person who struggled mightily with her personal demons. I know she suffered from mental illness and addiction. None of that makes what she did OK, but I can have pity on the brokenness within her that caused her to become an abuser. A happy and well-adjusted person wouldn't abuse a child. I can feel sorrow for the fact that she was unhappy and in turmoil. Once I was able to do that, she no longer lived in my head, and I set her behind me and moved on. I no longer wished her ill. By this time, she had died, having lived a short and tortured life, and I was able to find the grace to pray for mercy on her soul.

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

Forgiving others isn't something we do to get off the hook with God. We ought not do it because we feel obligated lest we suffer divine punishment. It has to come from the heart, and it's not always an easy thing to do. If you struggle to forgive, take it from me -- be patient and kind with yourself. Give yourself the time you need. And forgive only when you're ready to. But work toward it. That's the key. Don't give up. You'll feel the shift in your heart when it's time.

This is the hard work of Christianity. The hard work of humbling ourselves, picking up our crosses in imitation of Christ, and striving to conform ourselves to the will of God.

The Lord's Prayer, then, is not just a nice collection of words we say to please the Father. It's a challenge to us to change how we see the world. It's a call to humble ourselves before God and our fellow humans. It is, at its core, a prayer of personal transformation.

Lent 2020: Tough Love and "The Least of These"

"Then the King will turn to those on the left and say, 'Away with you, you cursed ones, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his demons. For I was hungry, and you didn't feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn't give me a drink. I was a stranger, and you didn't invite me into your home. I was naked, and you didn't give me clothing. I was sick and in prison, and you didn't visit me.' Then they will reply, 'Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?' And he will answer, 'I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.' And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life."

Michael Adams

Far too many modern Christians, especially American Christians, are eager to cast other sinners into hell for their transgressions -- especially, it seems, gay people. Let's just admit this right up front: Some corners of Christianity are obsessed with this subject. It sometimes seems as though Christianity is being reduced to two topics: opposing abortion, and condemning gay people, as if Jesus never spoke about anything else.

And that's the problem. He did speak about other things (and in fact never uttered a single word about abortion or homosexuality in any of the four Gospels). In particular, he tells us in Matthew 25 that one's eternal reward or punishment will be contingent on how one treated the "least of these," for when you refuse to help to a person in need, you refuse help to Christ himself. And that's because Christ sides with those in need, those whom the systems of injustice in this world have turned their backs on. We have seen this theme repeated over and over in the readings in this young Lenten season.

On the words of Matthew 25 hang the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, which all Catholics are expected to live out to the best of their ability: Feed the poor, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, visit the prisoner, and bury the dead.

This is not optional in the Christian life, as Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble writes today:

God's children are called to have hearts of compassion for every person in need and to acknowledge the countless cries of sorrow and terrified faces of desperation in our world. ... Saint John Chrysostom, commenting on this Gospel, wrote with similar bluntness and emphasis, "There is no pardon, no, none for him who does not do works of mercy." The road to heaven is paved with works of mercy, and these works are just as much for our well-being as they are for others. In serving the poor, we find Christ in our life. In serving the vulnerable, we evade death and find true and lasting life.

We can argue all day about the "clobber" verses with regard to same-sex attraction. The fact is that their original intent is not always clear and that they have to be understood in the context of their time and culture. What is clear is that condemning others to hell for their sexual orientation is not our job. Our job is to remember that we will be judged to the same degree we judge others, and that we need to tend to the log in our own eye before we notice the speck in our neighbor's eye (Matthew 7:1-5).

Moreover, Jesus laid out quite plainly what will condemn a person to be eternally cast out of his presence: the neglect of the very people whom so many homosexuality-condemning "pro-life" Chriatians commonly deride as lazy bums, thieves, freeloaders, criminals, animals. Think about how the average Christian talks about migrants, the homeless, those using public assistance, those who are sick because they can't afford healthcare, those on death row. Then go and read Matthew 25. The disconnect is not only hypocritical; it's tragic. We cannot expect to become Christ-like if we don't first follow in his footsteps and see the image of God in all our brothers and sisters.

"Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord' and not do as I say?" Christ's pointed question from Luke 6:46 unfortunately remains far too relevant today.

"The mystery of the poor is this," Dorothy Day once said: "That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for him. It is the only way we have of knowing and believing in our love."

May we all do better, for our own sake as well as for those in need.

Lent 2020: Be Like Christ

Koyodesigns

I have a feeling this is going to come off like a really cheesy sermon, but let's roll with it anyway.

If you're old, like I am, you remember those Gatorade ads from the early '90s that featured Michael Jordan. Celebrating his athletic prowess, the ads featured a memorable, ubpeat tune in which the singer longed to "be like Mike."

Those ads popped into my head when we were driving home from Mass today. My wife, who's not a practicing Catholic but has been a good sport about going to church as a family, asked me if the scripture readings usually have a theme that ties them together. In particular, she was wondering how today's first reading, the story of the Fall in Genesis, related to the devil's temptation of Jesus in the desert from the Book of Matthew. Her first thought was that the idea of free will tied them together.

I think that's part of the message we can take from each one. But I think what we're really seeing is a contrast between how we should and shouldn't respond to the will of God. In essence, don't do what Adam and Eve did -- do what the new Adam, Jesus, did. When temptation comes, be like Christ. Doesn't make for as catchy of a jingle, but there you have it.

Let's talk for a minute about theosis. It's something I ponder frequently. It's one of the things that attracts me so strongly to Orthodoxy, as it's an idea that's central to Eastern Christianity. The gist of it is that the more we imitate Christ, the more we reflect God. "God became man so that man might become like God," St. Athanasius said. Christ has given us everything we need to pursue a godly life and to be "partakers in the divine nature," as Peter said in 2 Peter 1:4. In the words of Jesus himself (John 10:34), "Is it not written in your law, 'I have said, You are Gods'?" This is our purpose, as followers of Christ.

To Western Christians, this idea might sound bizarre, even blasphemous. Perhaps that's because in the West, and especially in the Reformed traditions, we find an overarching emphasis on the idea that we are incapable of bettering ourselves. If you're a rotten person, you'll always be a rotten person. Couple this with the idea that the only thing you need to do to gain eternal salvation is to make a one-time intellectual assent with no further effort needed, and you end up with people thinking that because they've handed it all over to God, it's OK for them to remain their current rotten selves. At best, this attitude creates spiritual apathy; at worst, it makes Christianity look to outsiders as being populated by people who neither look like Christ nor attempt to follow in his footsteps.

But what if we're the only Bible some people will ever read? It's imperative for us to think about that before we present ourselves as a Christian to someone else. A brilliant observation from Thomas Merton drives the point home:

Do not be too quick to assume that your enemy is an enemy of God just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy precisely because he can find nothing in you that gives glory to God. Perhaps he fears you because he can find nothing in you of God’s love and God’s kindness and God’s patience and mercy and understanding of the weaknesses of men. Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God, for perhaps it is your own coldness and avarice, your mediocrity and materialism, your sensuality and selfishness that have killed his faith.

In other words, reflecting the goodness of Christ into the world isn't just something we do for its own sake, or to be nice, or in hopes of gaining some kind of supernatural brownie points. It's because we are the hands and feet of Christ, and if we want to draw people to Christ, we can't do it by judging them for their failures, or shaming them with isolated verses of scripture, or threatening them with hellfire. When is the last time somebody won you over to their point of view by telling you how lousy you are if you don't see things their way?

And we do this not just because it's nice to rack up converts and "get people on our side," but because we believe that to have Christ in our hearts is to heal the world -- to feed the poor, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, love the unloved, stand up for the oppressed, reject violence, and show the world that God is love.

This is the heart of theosis, and it is the heart of what it means to be like Christ, in a world that so badly needs his love, mercy, forgiveness, and compassion.

Lent 2020: The Myth of the "Pretty Good Person"

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

That's the Jesus Prayer, a very simple plea that the Orthodox use in imitation of the tax collector who, in the presence of the righteous Pharisee, bowed his head and struck his breast, acknowledging his sinfulness and humbly asking for God's mercy. Many Orthodox will repeat that simple prayer over and over throughout the day, like a mantra, keeping track of their recitations on a prayer rope.

In our readings today, Jesus reminds those same Pharisees that he came not to save the righteous but sinners. And while I might be critical of many who practice Christianity but don't act Christ-like, I acknowledge my own shortcomings as well. I fall into fear and despair too easily. I succumb to gluttony, both in food and in material things. And in a land of plenty, I think my biggest fault is not sharing as freely of my means as I could with the poor and needy. We are all, in fact, at fault if we aren't prepared to give up all we have and follow Jesus. The young rich man couldn't do it and walked away in sadness from Christ. Could we, if asked? Do we feel a sting of guilt when we encounter the following challenge put forth by St. Basil the Great?

When someone steals another's clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who would clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money you hoard up belongs to the poor.

We are all guilty before God in this regard. Let none of us think we are righteous and pure.

Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble had this to say on the matter in today's Remember Your Death entry:

We rationalize our sins thinking, "Oh, that was pretty minor. I don't think that was a big deal." We evaluate ourselves against other people and think, "I'm not that bad. I mean, comparatively, I think I'm a pretty good person." 

Meanwhile confessionals remain dusty as we all die of the terminal illness of being a "pretty good person." The scourge of our modern age is the widespread acceptance of the "pretty good person" ideal. First, because the bar of goodness is set extremely low. Serious sins are batted away with the roll of an eye and venial sins are either completely ignored or elevated to primary importance, and second, because to be a "pretty good person" is not the same as striving to live a virtuous life. Valuing virtue has all but disappeared, dismissed as unrealistic, impossible. Instead, we eagerly embrace mediocrity without realizing how easily a "pretty good person" can fall into wretched evil. 

As we saw in yesterday's reading from Isaiah, God looks favorably on those who carry out justice for the poor and needy. Today, he tells us again:

Feed the hungry, and help those in trouble. Then your light will shine out from the darkness, and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon. The Lord will guide you continually, giving you water when you are dry and restoring your strength. You will be like a well-watered garden, like an ever-flowing spring. 

We cry out for God's mercy and favor. Over and over, he shows us how to receive it. The question is whether we're up for the challenge.

Lent 2020: Look at Me! Look at Me!

At Ash Wednesday Mass, our priest got a good chuckle out of the congregation when he talked about our fasting. Catholics are asked to fast on two days during Lent -- Ash Wednesday, at the beginning, and Good Friday, near the end -- and also to refrain from eating red meat on all Fridays. Our Gospel reading on Ash Wednesday had Jesus telling his followers not to make a public spectacle of their fasting and praying, like the hypocrites do, expecting praise for their actions. So what you don't want to do, Father told us, is to go about your day doubled over in misery, and when someone asks you what's wrong, you answer, breathlessly, "I'm Catholic ... fasting ... don't know if I'm gonna make it."

Fasting, in the words of St. Symeon the New Theologian, is an action that, when performed in the proper spirit, "penetrates and softens hardness of heart." If there's no effort at transformation, there's no point. As Sirach 34:26 states, "A man who fasts for his sins, but then goes and commits them again: Who will hear his prayer, and what has he gained by his mortification?"

Sacrifice for its own sake is all well and good, but does it change who we are, or are we only trying to appease God, in hopes he might have mercy on us? As God tells us in Psalm 50:

I have no complaint about your sacrifices or the burnt offerings you constantly offer.
But I do not need the bulls from your barns or the goats from your pens.
For all the animals of the forest are mine, and I own the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know every bird on the mountains, and all the animals of the field are mine.
If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for all the world is mine and everything in it.
Do I eat the meat of bulls? Do I drink the blood of goats?
Make thankfulness your sacrifice to God, and keep the vows you made to the Most High.
Then call on me when you are in trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will give me glory.

God already owns the animals that the faithful placed on the altar. The point was never to appease God with meat he wouldn't eat, but to sacrifice something of value to the owner, and in turn to soften the giver's heart, to open the giver to the potential for change that a personally significant sacrifice might stir in his or her heart.

The goal is to humble ourselves so that we might carry out God's will. And what is God's will? Christ reminded us all the time during his ministry that we are to love God and neighbor -- and that, more than anything, takes the form of caring for God's children who are most in need. We see it in today's first reading, from Chapter 58 of Isaiah:

Tell my people Israel of their sins! Yet they act so pious. They come to the temple every day and seem delighted to learn all about me. They act like a righteous nation that would never abandon the laws of God. They ask me to take action on their behalf, pretending they want to be near me. "We have fasted before you!" they say. "Why aren't you impressed? We have been very hard on ourselves. and you don't even notice it?"

That's where the words of our priest from Ash Wednesday ring out. "Look what I'm doing by fasting! Surely this will score me some God points." It's no different from when the pious Pharisee stood in the temple and proclaimed to all who could hear how holy he was, and how much he gave to the temple, and thanked God that he wasn't a lowly sinner like the tax collector who stood behind him.

Our passage from Isaiah goes on, as God sets the people straight:

"I will tell you why!" I respond. "It's because you are fasting to please yourselves. Even while you fast, you keep oppressing your workers. What good is fasting when you keep on fighting and quarreling? This kind of fasting will never get you anywhere with me. You humble yourselves by going through the motions of penance, bowing your heads like reeds bending in the wind. You dress in burlap and cover yourselves with ashes. Is this what they call fasting? Do you really think this will please the Lord?"  

"No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people. Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help. Then your salvation will come like the dawn, and your wounds will quickly heal. Your Godliness will lead you forward, and the glory of the Lord will answer." 

The best fast we can undertake, in other words, is to fast from injustice and oppression. To be the hands and feet of the merciful Christ in this world. More to the point: Fasting that doesn't incorporate social justice is useless.

When we see self-proclaimed Christians lamenting the corrupt state of the world on one hand, but sneering at the poor and needy on the other hand, is it any wonder why God doesn't hear their cries? We reap what we sow. As Jesus himself said, "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord' and not do as I say?"

Likewise, God asks in Psalm 50: "Why bother reciting my decrees and pretending to obey my covenant? For you refuse my discipline and treat my words like trash."

All he wants from us, as Micah 6:8 reminds us, is to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with him. The real point of our Lenten sacrifices is to conform ourselves to that vision that God has for us. May we all find it within ourselves this season to open our hearts to our brothers and sisters, to empty ourselves of our selfish ambitions and misguided righteousness, and to humble ourselves before the will of God.

(Special thanks to Magnificat, without whom today's entry would not have been possible.)