"Behold, the day of your fast Take care of your business, harassed all your workers. Behold, you fast in strife and bickering and hitting with fists unfair. Not as fast as you do today, so listen up to your racket. Is it like this the fast that I long for the day in which man is mortified? Bend your head like a reed, sackcloth and ashes for a bed, perhaps you would like to call this day fasting and pleasing to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry, house the homeless poor, clothe the naked, without taking his eyes from your people? "(Isaiah 58: 4-7).
With Ash Wednesday begins Lent, a season of the liturgical year, in which the faithful are called with particular attention to works of penance, prayer and charity. Today, if you still can not understand the meaning of charity and to sense the meaning of prayer, has lost almost all the way instead of penance. Why fast because abstain from meat because it lacks what we like, why make flowers? One can believe in a God and a religion that seem to want us to live in the narrowness and deprivation, especially when life has been so generous to us by let us not miss anything?
Lenten fasting and penance are indeed made by certain culture "liberal" as the residue of an archaic and convoluted conception of religion, which is suffocating under the precepts of human freedom. In fact, the ascetic practices lay bare the inadequacy of a certain way, everything the modern understanding of freedom. In the Christian view, in fact, are not material things to secure our freedom, as may be useful in everyday life. Freedom - the real one - comes from God's voluntary surrender, by penitential works, goods of this world, especially in the case of goods unnecessary, therefore, serves to bring us back to basics, that is, faith in God, and recognize that without him there can be no true freedom. A freedom without God would, in fact, a freedom based solely on things, now and tomorrow we are not there anymore. A freedom ephemeral, evanescent, in fact, a semblance of freedom (even if presented by the world as the only possible freedom).
Penance - as the prophet Isaiah reminds us - is not a set of external practices, but the mood of the person who starts and sincerely looking for God, recognizing his sin, doeth the works of true true conversion. Woe to separate the works from the penitential path of conversion, personal development! To no avail fasting, prayer, mortifications if not then we can change our behavior, if not for anything we progress along the path of justice. Fasting of the hypocrites is not pleasing to God! Even before the body to make fast, we make fast our soul, mortify our pride, our greed, our greed, our lust. Only in this way, deprived of what is useless, careless or malicious, the soul will be filled with God, his true nourishment.
The ascetic practices, if done with right intention and sincerity mood, produce delicious fruit that can be summarized as follows: help to turn our attention to God, facilitating meditation taught to have control of their bodies and their thoughts, controlling their impulses, their own passions, their "perversions" make us more sensitive to pain and misfortune of others ("He who fasts understand what it means for others not to have to eat. listening to the hungry, if he wants God likes his fast," warned Saint Peter Chrysologus ) help us see things in their proper perspective, giving more importance to spiritual values \u200b\u200bover material values \u200b\u200band "cheap", but above all impress the "character", that qualities which, unfortunately, many Christians today are lacking, trembling in the face of provocation or the various and strange doctrines of our day. As Paul VI wrote in his first encyclical, " soft and cowardly is not Christian, but strong and faithful."
Lent, with its triple recipe made of "prayer, penance and charity," does just that. We do not live this time of grace, then lightly: it is time to return to the Lord and to convert the heart.
Salone di Bartolo
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