Fasting of some kind will soon become popular again, for Lent is upon us. For a culture soaked in self-esteem one wonders how fasting is understood, what is expected from this brief season of self denial. Can this fast cultivate authentic compassion for others in a society dedicated to “my passion”? Belden C. Lane writes:
“[the] idea of compassion as the fruit of indifference is difficult to grasp in our contemporary culture. Popular conceptions of love are so often limited to sentimental feelings and delusions of self-denying grandeur. As a result, we often fail to recognize the extent to which all this disguises a highly manipulative bid for our own self-aggrandizement. We are entirely too needy, too anxious about the fragility of our own self-worth, to be free to love. We have missed the desert truth that, ironically, only those who no longer care can be truly loving. Love at its best, as Dostoyevsky knew, is wholly disinterested—‘a harsh and dreadful thing.’”
“Having metaphorically died to the world and all its seductions, [these] . . . desert athletes . . . were far less subject to outside pressures of status, power, money, and knowledge.”
“No threat is as dangerous as a people wholly set free from the value structures of this world.”
Belden C. Lane, “Desert Catechesis: The Landscape and Theology of Early Christian Monasticism,” Anglican Theological Review 75.3 (1993): 308-09, 310.
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