I have recently read, with a certain satisfaction, of the spread of the physical benefits of fasting. I refer to the increasing practice of “intermittent fasting” or fasting one day a week. I say it because, coming from Lebanon, there are beautiful practices that I have guarded while living in Italy for over twenty years. An example, during the time of Lent, is fasting from midnight to noon as well as fasting from midnight on Holy Thursday until the South of Holy Saturday … and every year it was the usual story; I had to hear the predictions of those who told me that it was not greeting: «Breakfast is fundamental … breakfast is not skipped … etc. etc. »
I am not here to make an apology of fasting, but I want to underline a precise face that must accompany this ascetic practice: charity. In a song of the Vespers on Tuesday of Lent, the liturgy of the Maronite Church – soaked in the theology of the Eastern Fathers, especially those Syriacs – strictly connects fasting and Lent with charity. The song reads like this: “How splendid the fasting is / that you adorn the love / generous bread your bread with those who are hungry / otherwise yours is not fasting, but savings”. Perhaps in our day he does not fast to save, but more to lose weight. The Church, which teaches through the liturgical time of Lent, recalls that Christian fasting is much more than the abstinence from food. Sacrifices take value if they become love. In other words, fasting must lead us to two complementary practices of love: love for the Lord, so that physical hunger is memory of our hunger for him, of our “poverty in spirit” (see Matthew 5,3); Love towards others, because feeling hunger voluntarily opens our hearts (and hands) towards those who are not by his will.
Only in this way – with concrete love – fasting stops being a self -referential practice or, worse, contempt for the body and matter, as a legacy of dualistic ideologies extraneous to Christianity. We then live fasting as a form of love by listening to a recommendation on fasting from another verse from the Maronite office: «To those who need it gives what has advanced to you / and you will experience the fertility of Lent / Sing the fast with two mouths: a mouth that fasting! / And another who rejoices thanks to your gift! ».
