Spring Cleaning

Fasting

   For a very long time Lent has been a time of repentance, of fasting and sacrifice, of prayerful preparation for the holiest days in the Christian calendar, Easter week.  When I was a kid, I thought Christmas should be the holiest day.  I liked Christmas presents a lot better than Easter baskets.  Yet throughout the world, from time before time was recorded, spring rituals were the most sacred because they prepared for new life.  The greatest wonder of all is that new life arose from the ashes of what had died in the dark of winter.

   All the great religions have times of prayer and fasting and repentance at this time of year, in preparation for their holiest days.  The ritual is not valuable because we are Christian or Jew or Muslim or Hindu, it is valuable because in the cycles of our lives this inner journey is what brings life’s greatest riches.  Times of community ritual bring structured opportunity to examine what’s happening inside us, and to make wiser choices, leading to greater joy.  Repentance isn’t about beating our breasts and proclaiming we are sinners.  Go back to the Latin roots, “Re,” which means go back, and “Pentare,” which means choose again.  Go back and choose again.  We look at fasting not as a punishment of our sinful bodies, but as a release of what we no longer want.  So we fast from blame, from judgment, from a physical habit that is unhealthy for us.  We fast from fear and other negative thinking.

   We are invited to engage in some major spiritual practices, and really work with them in the next few weeks, taking real steps in growth so that when we gather together for the high holy days of our tradition, it is not a celebration of historical events only, but also a celebration of what is happening in the core of our own lives; that there is a rising up.  There is new light at work in us.  The life that we have known has been laid down, and we are on new ground.  That is the invitation from Spirit to each and every one of us; an invitation that is repeated every spring during our entire lives.  We answer that invitation with the recognition that these are spiritual practices, not just Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu practices, and as such have been used and proven in all the world’s great religions from time immemorial.  Today few are aware that the ancient, forgotten religions and those of indigenous peoples also share this time of rebirth with their own rituals.  Spirit calls us to this season of remembrance and renewal in every time and place.

   I invite you to begin your holy practices in this season by clearing space in your being for a greater reality by fasting.  As you fast from something you no longer want in your life, you make room for a higher expression of your true nature, as a son or daughter of life itself.