Fast and Feast

March 1, 2020

For my Lenten discipline this year, other than writing each evening, I’m abstaining from Facebook. When our kids were swimming competitively, their practices consisted not only of mastering the finer points of the strokes, starts, and turns; most of their practice time was simply building endurance with sprints and repeated laps in the pool. They would swim miles every day. All season long, they were swimming tired. Practices intensified throughout the season until just before county and sectional meets when they tapered. Coach gradually eased off so they could swim rested for these important meets where they would drop their times and often break records. Everything was geared towards Sectionals, and for some, States. The seasons of Advent and Lent are a lot like the regular swim season—hard discipline designed to prepare us for the joyful seasons of Christmas and Easter, their deprivation heightening the experience of the holy days.

In the Christian liturgical calendar however, in the midst of the seasons of determined and deliberate deprivation are the feast days. Sundays are always a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and as such, are not fast days. What that means is, on Sundays, fasting is suspended. So when I was fasting from coffee, on Sundays I could enjoy a cup or two of joe and still remain within the discipline. Mondays, it was time to return to the fast. 

This worked just fine for me when I was fasting from coffee; Caffeine has very little hold on me—I can take it or leave it. It’s the taste of the coffee that I like, not the buzz. Social media is different. I find that the urge to check the latest or scroll through is continually with me, so much so that I dare not take advantage of the fasting hiatus lest it get its hooks into me again. I need more time away if I am to break these chains. I’m sure it’s not the same problem for everyone, but I know it is for me. Easter will come soon enough. Perhaps by then, FB will have lost its hold on me and I can return to a more measured use of it. 

I don’t blame Facebook; the problem is in me, and it’s there that the solution must be found. Christ in me is the answer, for as St. John said, “Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. That is my hope and my confidence, for which I give thanks tonight.