Fasting & Sacrifice: FtJ 8

Before Discussion Notes

Four Reasons to Fast:

• Self-mastery – To be able to say no to ourselves allows us to be truly free
• Obedience & discernment – obedience to the Church on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Fasting can open us up to someone telling us what to do (discernment). 
• Worship, sacrifice – Fasting is a sacrifice and sacrifice is always oriented towards worship. 
• To be a co-redeemer with Jesus – we can unite our sufferings to the cross of Jesus for the salvation of the world.

Sister Lúcia and Our Lady of Fatima Explain Fasting and Sacrifice

https://www.ncregister.com/blog/sister-lucia-of-fatima-on-fasting-and-sacrifice

• Sister Lúcia explains that Our Lady wants us to “make of everything you can a sacrifice, and offer it to God as an act of reparation for the sins by which he is offended and in supplication for the conversion of sinners.”
• Sacrifices can be physical, spiritual, material, intellectual or moral undertakings.
• Where to begin? prayer, temperance, modesty, and charity

After Discussion Notes

• We often think of fasting only for food and forget that we can fast from complaining, social media, inattention to our children or spouses, etc.
• We talked about the struggle for nursing mothers who want to fast from food but can’t because of the needs of their child. Another act of penance that a mother can easily do is abstain from meat on all Fridays of the year, not just during lent.
• Some expressed how some days, work or home life is so busy that you forget to eat which can be offered up at the end of the day when you realize what has happened, but it’d be wonderful to think of it beforehand and intentionally fast throughout the day.
• Fasting helps us to practice and grow in the virtue of temperance.
• Father Barnabas (a guest of this FtJ) said, “Fasting without love is meaningless.” When asked to repeat it, he said, “Anything without love is meaningless.” When it was said that fasting can help us attain holiness, Fr. Barnabas also said that holiness is love.
• This was read from the Office of Reading: “We pray in spirit, and so offer in spirit the sacrifice of prayer. Prayer is an offering that belongs to God and is acceptable to him: it is the offering he has asked for, the offering he planned as his own. We must dedicate this offering with our whole heart, we must fatten it on faith, tend it by truth, keep it unblemished through innocence and clean through chastity, and crown it with love. We must escort it to the altar of God in a procession of good works to the sound of psalms and hymns. Then it will gain for us all that we ask of God.”
• We rarely think of prayer being a sacrifice. We tend to think of it more of a conversation or worse, a transaction, but just like we can offer our day, our joys, our sufferings, and harships, we can offer the Lord our prayers.