3.30.14

So it's a feast day again, and I may surprise you by saying that I don't particularly like the fact that there are feast days.

Why, you ask? It took me a while to come around to the answer, because at face value it makes sense that when you choose to deprive yourself of something and you find out that on every seventh day you get a break from the deprivation, you would thoroughly enjoy the seventh day. And, well, that's the point of the Sabbath anyway - like I wrote a few years ago, every Sunday is a day of remembrance of that day on which the sinless man who had been beaten, humiliated, and murdered was raised from the dead. It's kind of a big deal, and definitely a reason for celebration and feasting.

I must conclude that the problem isn't with the the principle of feasting, it's in my approach to fasting.

I have a fascination with doing difficult things - a complicated word problem, dragging myself out of bed at dawn for a day of hard labor, stress hikes, the all-night study session - because of the personal satisfaction I feel at the end of it. Additionally, I have a strange enjoyment of the deprivation itself, the experience of "mind over matter" as I flex my muscles of self-denial. Put those things together and you have a temperament always up for a challenge and willing to make sacrifices to accomplish something. Put that way, I sound like a pretty great person, don't I? So what's wrong with the picture?

I find that I resent the upcoming weekly breaks in the fast because they remind me that fast isn't about me at all, nor about how much I can handle or how good a person I'll be when I have "gone without" for a few weeks. In fact, I anticipate that each Sunday will feel like resetting of all of the endurance I have built up over the previous six days and Monday begins just a little more miserable than Saturday. Ultimately the posture of fasting shouldn't be about facing down a challenge or proving one's will-power, it should be a posture of mourning over one's weakness, submission to God, and soberly rejoicing in his grace.

I can say that, but I don't completely understand it. Mourning, submission, and sobriety are not popular postures and they appear rarely in my life. I can only hope that the contrast of fasting with feasting will teach me to comprehend them better.