A Secret of Saint Francis
In her apparitions, Our Lady reminds us of the importance of fasting. It is a discipline held out to us first by her Son when he taught His disciples that some evils can be overcome “only with prayer and fasting.”
That in itself should be reason enough for us to fast. How many of us feel broken-hearted and powerless when we think of our loved ones who seem to be in helpless situations. Fasting can help, because fasting has a way of bringing spiritual graces into the life of a person in a way quite unlike any other.
But fasting is also of direct benefit to the person who is fasting. It offers us a concrete way of disciplining our passions and appetites.
When we say that the human person is made in the image of God, we mean that we are like Him in our intelligence and free will. There are other ways that the human person makes God visible in the world - not the least of which is the relationship between man and woman - but with regard to fasting let’s stay with the intellect and will.
Very simply, fasting helps us to curb that constant tendency of our passions and appetites to overpower our intellect and will. Fasting is a way of using our intelligence and our free will to say to our passions, “Not today!” and to our appetites, “Don’t worry, you won’t die. Stop whining.”
It’s not easy. Nor it is pleasant. We give free rein to our passions and appetites so often that fasting feels like being at war with our own body. But that is, in some sense, precisely what it is. We don’t want to be like the animals who do whatever their instinctual appetites tell them to, but it requires sometimes painful discipline to set them straight.
The human intellect and will are the highest qualities of the human person. The passions and the appetites should be subordinate to what we know and what we choose. But so often, the passions and appetites lead the show, causing us to do what we know we shouldn’t do and what we don’t want to do. And then we’re miserable.
It’s laughable, really. When we’re fasting our appetites revolts, “But you will be unhappy.” But unhappiness is precisely what I feel whenever I let my appetites take over! The momentary affliction of fasting, say on Fridays, painful as it is, is really so that I can be happy for the rest of the week.
On this Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi many will wrongly think of him as someone who worshipped the animals, or who believed that animals are equal to the human person in dignity. In reality, the animals were attracted to Saint Francis because he had so disciplined his passions and appetites through fasting that when he spoke the animals heard the voice of a real man, another Christ, or another Adam before the Fall, when Adam and Eve still had dominion over all the creatures of the earth, when they were not afraid of the roaring lion. +
