March 15, 2021
Today the Great Fast Begins
It is the time of reconciliation with God, with oneself, with one’s neighbour.
It is the time of humility and of forgiveness!
It is the time of our preparation for the Great Passage:
the Lord’s Great Passage from death to Life, which we celebrate every year and every Sunday; the Great Passage from man to man made God, which the Lord sets before us and promises us (“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” — John 17); and also the Great Passage of each of us from here to the other side.
It is a time of prayer, of silence and of hungering.
Yes, of hungering! Of hungering, as the Lord Himself did it: “And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.” (Matthew 4:2)
Our hunger for God cannot be fed but with another hunger, for the fullness of the Godhead is glimpsed only out of privations: the lack of this world, the lack of malice, the lack of pride, the lack of self. And nothing makes the insubstantiality of this world more present, more evident, than the lack of food — hunger!
Yes, I am speaking of physical hunger, real hunger, hunger for food! I have spoken of this once before: how many of us still know what hunger is? What thirst is? Not the “I could eat something…” kind. That true hunger, which only the poor and the animals still feel!
How many of us still know what it is to be in need, in straits?
“The rich man never believes the poor, nor the full-fed the hungry,” the Romanian proverb says very well. For so it is: it is impossible to feel with one whose condition you cannot even imagine.
Do you wish to begin being human again, to strip yourselves of the ravings and the surpluses, of the phantoms and the wanderings of this world? Try hunger! Try thirst! They are the antidote to every net and every snare!
“Hungering” is the beginning of the breaking of the heart; it is the way of true humility.
Hunger for the things of this world, and you will hunger for God no longer!
A luminous and blessed fast!
Forgive and bless, brethren!
Postscript: for all the above I beg you to forgive me if, in the time to come, I decline your sincere invitations to go out for a meal, or merely to eat something, anything, together!
For the same reason my posts too will be rarer, and will concern only the urgent and burning subjects from which we cannot withdraw… for now!
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