This post was originally published on this site
by Steven Christoforou, Executive Director of FOCUS
But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting…
(Matthew 6:17-18)
“What are you giving up for Lent this year?”
It’s a question you’ve likely received from others. Maybe it’s even one you’ve asked…
But there are least two problems with this question because it presumes that Lent is:
- an individual rather than communal undertaking, and
- a time of loss rather than gain.
In the Church, we don’t set individual Lenten goals for ourselves. The fasting discipline of the Church is clear and applies to us all: we attend more services, we avoid eating animal products, we give more alms, etc.
Lent, in other words, isn’t something that I do as I wish. It’s something that we do as a Body, guided by the Church’s general instructions (and, when there are questions about how these general instructions apply to me, the guidance of my spiritual father rather than my own will).
But more than that, Great Lent isn’t really a period when we’re giving up anything at all…
Sure, we have less free time if we actually attend more services. And sure, we go without some of our favorite foods for weeks.
But if we are setting aside good things, it’s for the sake of a greater thing: the pearl of great price, which when a merchant found it he “went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matthew 13:45-46).
We are setting aside good things for the Greatest Thing: the Kingdom of Heaven, the Household of God our Father.
We are setting aside good things for the Greatest One: the Lord Himself.
It’s the Kingdom we experience when we walk into a still and dark church building, to let words of compunction wash over us and pierce our hearts.
It’s the Household of God we experience when we sit down for a meal with someone who is poor or alone; someone trapped in darkness, desperate for the Light of Christ to wash over them.
Great Lent is a time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. By themselves, prayer and fasting can collapse into individual pursuits, things that we do as we wish, on our own terms.
But almsgiving breaks us out of the illusion of individuality. To serve another is to come face-to-face with another–and ultimately face-to-face with the Lord Himself.
Almsgiving is not simply parting with our money but prioritizing our relationships with our brothers and sisters who’ve been pushed to the margins: the poor, the sick, the houseless, the lonely.
In those face-to-face encounters, as we come to know one who was a stranger, we come to know ourselves as children of the Living God, people who are merciful as our Father is merciful (Luke 6:36).
And it helps to reorient all the practices of the Christian life–prayer, fasting, and almsgiving–as practices that we undertake together, as a united Body of believers; as practices of gain rather than loss, of joy rather than sorrow.
The Lord tells us to “anoint our head and wash our face” when we fast, not simply to hide our fasting but because there is life and radiance in these Lenten practices, not death and darkness.
If you live near a FOCUS Center, I invite you to join us for a meal or other community event. Sit down next to someone whose path you otherwise would never cross: share a meal, hear their story, look them in the eye and connect with them as fellow human beings.
If you don’t live near a FOCUS Center, I invite you to reach out to us and begin exploring what it would take to either start a FOCUS Center or an ongoing service initiative as a parish.
Great Lent is a time of joyful communion, a reorientation of our lives so that we may seek the Greatest Thing and the Greatest One. May the Lord bless this Lenten season and bring us all, rich and poor, together around a table in anticipation of the day we will all gather in our Father’s House around His Table.
