While looking for pictures for a forthcoming post on boys and girls at play, I came across this photo that I took in downtown Chicago last November. We were protesting abortion at Daley Plaza that day, and they were repaving Clark Street.
Rough Grooved Surface. Sounds about like how I feel right now at this point in the Great Fast. Come, Holy Steamroller, and repave my soul!
Today we chant the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, one of those landmarks of Great Lent like last week’s observation of Mid-Lent. Of Mid-Lent, by the way, one might be tempted to say, “It’s all down hill from here!” but in fact it’s all very much uphill from here, with the air thinning at every step.
The fifth week of the Great Fast is difficult, I find. Somehow, it feels as if it’s the sixth week—as if Great and Holy Week is just upon us. But it is not; there is another whole week of Lent to go, after this one, before that week that, because of its intensity, is actually more endurable. Pascha is in view, and already in the midst of deeper prayer and more rigorous fasting the chords of paschal joy are beginning to vibrate softly within the soul.
We are now in the third week of the Great Fast. I wrote several posts about the Fast last year, but as yet I don’t feel called to write much about it this year. However, I do want to address the question of whether one ought to fast on Sundays during Lent.
My short answer is: Yes.
I came upon a post recently by one Father Joe, priest in Maryland, in which he criticized the notion husbands and wives confront a demonic struggle in the midst of their marriage, and that to be victorious in this struggle they would do well to employ fasting, singled out by Jesus as particularly effective for casting out demons. Fr. Joe writes:
“Marriages are not principally about powers and principalities, they are about dirty diapers, crying babies, doctors’ bills, making beds, fixing the car, going to church as a family, sleeping as husband and wife naked together under the covers, and so much more.”
Unfortunately, my comments in reponse to this passage were removed from the blog. I offer them here—not to give new life to my dispute with Fr. Joe about what he wrote, which was in response to a particular set of circumstances, but because I wish to share what I hope are a few worthy thoughts.
Yesterday I dropped by the Borders in Champaign, IL after a special Divine Liturgy there to pick up Rod Dreher’s book Crunchy Cons (more on that in a future post). While roaming around the store looking for Dreher’s book I saw no fewer than three editions of The Da Vinci Code, including a thick, new “Illustrated Edition.” There were also several books on the so-called Gospel of Judas, and a number of other books purporting to tell us the “true story” of Jesus.
What all these books have in common, of course, is the consoling news that Jesus is not who the canonical gospels say he is, the Son of God who is one with God the Father, through whom the Father sends forth his Holy Spirit to transform the world. I suppose nothing so capsulizes the hubris of this age than such books, which claim to have discovered the “truth” about Jesus that was somehow hidden from his disciples and their closest friends, those who wrote the first “True Story of Jesus” books—the ones you’ll find in the New Testament.