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| Ashes to ashes and dust to dust |
The Pharisees and their scribes complained to his disciples, saying,
"Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?"
Jesus said to them in reply,
"Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do.
I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners."
"Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?"
Jesus said to them in reply,
"Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do.
I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners."
The Irish tell of the Hungry Grass. If you're walking somewhere in Ireland and suddenly feel a desperate need to eat, you may have trodden upon hungry grass. During the Great Potato Famine of the 1840's someone starved to death on this spot. Many thousands of Irish people starved to death during the Famine, although the island was exporting food. There was more profit in exports than in feeding penniless natives.
On this fourth day of Lent the question of fasting reappears. It is very important.
Yesterday I described my own decision to die a skinny old man. Hopefully that day is still a long way off but, like retirement, pensions and IRA's, it requires advance planning.
One of the major hurdles on the road to good health and spiritual fasting is the fear of hunger. It seems to be encoded in our American DNA. Perhaps it came with the Great Depression which my grandparents' generation survived. Certainly many of our ancestors in Europe faced the hunger that follows in the wake of war. They came to America to escape it.
For most of us today the fear is irrational. We pay less for food than any nation on earth because our federal government subsidizes the industry. But we panic when we feel the pangs of hunger; and that inevitably leads to overeating.
It doesn't help that our entertainment media continually display food before our eyes. Desperate to sell their wares, they show fashionably thin people gorging on food. (Obviously they don't film these ads in their own fast food restaurants! Take a look around the next time you're in one!)
Lent reminds us of the faith, hope and love we invest in God. Although those investments seem to disappear in a bottomless abyss, we believe the Lord will not forget the people who trust and wait on his mercy.
I was raised by a father who lived through the Great Depression. It was always a mindset of bare survival. I want to tell him. You did survive. We have all survived. Now is the time to be able to thrive. To go beyond barely hanging on. Now is the time to look outside oneself and see that in justice others as well can thrive.
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