The seasons are changing—and I don’t only mean the sudden warmth outside. (Okay, maybe “warmth.”) This Sunday is the last Sunday after the Epiphany, and the celebrations of Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday will soon move on to the solemnities of Ash Wednesday. In other words, this is the final News & Notes before Lent begins.
Conversations this time of year often include the question, “What are you giving up for Lent?” Some people choose to fast from something they enjoy; others take the opportunity to permanently turn away from something they regret. Many people choose to “take something on,” a new spiritual practice or act of service.
Whether you’re still wondering about a Lenten fast or practice, or you’ve already decided—or even if you aren’t planning to change a thing!—I want to invite you to think about the words of Isaiah in our first reading for Ash Wednesday.
Isaiah describes his people’s practices of fasting, more than 2500 years ago: practices of piety and self-humbling, intended to appease their God. And then the prophet says—speaking in the voice of God—
5 Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
6 Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
(Isaiah 58:5-7)
With these words, God reorients our attention. God looks at our practices of repentance and piety—our bowing down and kneeling, our foreheads marked with ashes, our many pious words—and asks: “Is such the fast that I choose?” Is this what will please God? Or is it something else? Is it humbling ourselves that turns us toward God? Or is it embracing someone else?
Lent is a season of reconciliation, in which we seek to restore our relationships with God and with one another, by participating in Christ’s work of reconciliation. In truth, this is always the work of the Church—Lent is just a season that focuses our attention on it in a special way. We always run the risk of turning Lent into a self-improvement challenge, a way of taking on a project that’s about individual spiritual growth or moral improvement.
But God doesn’t seem so concerned with our attempts to reconcile ourselves with God. God seems more interested, here, in our reconciliation with one another. Is not this the fast that God wants us to choose—“to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” God envisions our fast not as a way to improve ourselves, but as a way to improve the life of someone else. And this is why fasting and almsgiving have often been linked: you can take the money you don’t spend on chocolate in Lent (on alcohol, meat, coffee, whatever the case may be) and spend it charitably instead.
So if you’re trying to figure out which small luxury or minor vice you might give up this Lent—or if you’re wondering what practice it is that you might take on—I wonder whether you might take some time to reflect on these words: “Is not this the fast that I choose… Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”
These are big demands, and noble goals. Perhaps we can only begin to answer them in small ways. But this is the fast that God has chosen, for us: to turn outward, this Lent, not inward; to reflect on our mortality and our imperfection and to make them the basis for solidarity with our fellow human beings, because what’s true for one of us is true for all of us: We are but dust, and to dust we shall return.