For The Love Of Fasting

The whole point of contemplative prayer is to reveal and remove the limitations imposed on our perceptions through ordinary, enculturated daily life. This allows us to explore the possibilities of the direct experience of God both personally and in the fashion that God chooses to be mediated to us through the world around us. Contemplative living questions the requisites of social life, with one's place in it being set aside. It is an obscure way of coming to terms with God that is normally crowded out, and stands in stark contrast to it, inasmuch as it is an active exploration that passively forces open the frontier of human experience, relying not on ourselves but on the persistence of God waiting for us in the world. Sustained by a mystery of silence and incomprehensibility, genuine Christian faith affirms its personal call to live in a more intimate communion with this mystery, and that without responding to this summons there is no happiness simply because you are not being honest with yourself. Proto-Christianity has always affirmed this; the church over the millennia has strayed from it and now promotes something totally different.

Renounce yourself in order to follow Christ (Mt. 16:24, Lk. 9:23), discipline your body (I Col. 9:27), do not pamper yourself, love fasting.

- The Rule of St. Benedict 4:10-13