Text for the Times: The Right Use of Fasting

Extract

Christian penance, broadly speaking, may have two basic motives. First, and less attractively, it may be an ascetic instrument towards an individualist perfection, the negative side of an effort to allow the new life of grace to take hold of one's own personality. Secondly, it may be an identification with Christ in his sufferings, but not merely with the sufferings of Christ in his own life on earth; it must, to be fully actualised in the world, be an identification with Christ suffering in the members of his Body here and now, with the homeless, the hungry and the deprived of whatever race or religion. And it must find its full expression not in the denial of the Christian who practises it, but in the gift he can make as a result of it. As St Augustine says in the sermon translated below; ‘Here you are, doing yourself out of things; who are you going to give it to ?’

A Sermon on Psalm 42 by St Augustine</i>

This is a short psalm; so it will do nicely for satisfying eager minds without being irksome to fasting stomachs. May it provide food for our soul, which is said to be sad, according to the man who is speaking in this psalm ; sad, I think, because of some fast of his – or rather of some hunger, since fasting is something you do on purpose, while being hungry just happens to you.