Food and Fasting

Dinners were our delight.  I have many happy memories of dinner-and-a-show with you.  I put on weight, this last decade, eating your delicious cooking.  Despite what I may have suggested on occasion, gluttony is not one of the seven cardinal virtues.  It made a different top seven list.

You knew better, of course. You could see the value of moderation. You didn't see the point of fasting, though. I didn't push the point, since the Church never asked you to fast (first because you were non-Catholic, later because you were over the age of 59). Perhaps I was embarrassed to mention that over-indulgence leaves one more vulnerable to sins of impurity. (I have noticed that yielding to anger can have that effect, too. Let one demon in, and he brings his friends and they have a party in your soul. Such houseguests are difficult to evict). Fasting has the opposite effect. Never fasting, you did not know that.

Now, my bodiless friend, you must fast until the resurrection.

I should have pointed out that the saints fasted, and their austerities drew them closer to God. Jesus fasted, too. I could have mentioned that just as grace before meals draws our thoughts to God, so too does fasting. Fasting clarifies our thinking and helps us to place God first. I hesitated to mention fasting as training in self-control, since I provided you with such a poor model of self-control, but there is that, too, and fasting, with prayer and alms-giving, are gifts that we can offer to God in reparation for our sins.

... but, as you said more than once, "blah, blah, blah..." You don't need opinions, you need prayers. So I pray:

Help us, O God, our Savior, and for the glory of Thy Name, O Lord, deliver us; and forgive us our sins for Thy Name's sake. Grant us the grace, I pray, to repent, to do penance, and to sin no more. O Holy Father, make us Thy true children, temperate, discerning good from evil, choosing the good and steady in Thy service.

Merciful God, strengthen us and teach us to rein in the impulses of our lower selves which do not honor Thee. Help us to resist temptation and to be more generous in doing good, until it becomes our nature to speak and act always according to Thy wisdom.

Saint Yvo Helori, Saint Rita of Cascia, pray for us that we be freed from gluttony and all immoderate desires, so that we may be guided by reason and the Divine light in all that we do, glorifying God with our thoughts and actions. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.