Thoughts on Fasting

Fasting is a practice that God gives you in order to make you a "person" in the truest sense of the term.  A "person" is a relational human being; a being who realizes that they are not self-existent but intimately intertwined with and formed through the lives of all those around them.  The ancient Church adopted and modified the word "persona" to describe the beings of the Trinity whose existence is bound to the other beings in that Triune communion; beings who are eternally in relationship with one another (Father, Son and Holy-Spirit).  Each "person's" existence cannot be known apart from the relationships they indwell.  If we human beings are to seek to reflect the image and likeness of God, we to must become relational beings in the Way that God is.  In other words, we must learn to love properly since "God is love" and love is the description of communion actualized.  This is precisely how fasting helps us to become persons.  We, as sinful people, have the tendency to prioritize our own wants before the needs of others.  Fasting helps us to kill the seeds of and the tendencies that impel us towards individualism.  It helps us to say “no” to ourselves and it helps us to remove the selfish desires that distract us so that we can be more aware and available to the others we are truly in communion with.  The practice helps to extinguish the tendency within us to use people for our own self-interests.  It forms us in the Way of self-denial for the sake of others and ingrains in us  the understanding that other people are placed in our lives not as objects to be used but as persons to be loved and celebrated for the unique creation that they are.  It teaches us that the way we exist for others and the way that they exist for us truly matters.  It instills in us the understanding that even reality itself is formed through how we treat and how we are treated by those around us.   

 

Reflections on 1 John 3:18

"Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth."

Love is not a concept, nor is it an emotion.  So, seeking to love purely through words will not suffice.  Love is a mode of being, a Way of existing, a Way of life.  One can talk constantly about love but never truly live in its ways.  On the other hand, love is not solely isolated ethical actions but it is the very thing which gives us our existence.  This is why it is not enough to love simply with actions apart from truth.  Ethical notions of love in modern society are far too temporary.  Love is not meant to be a temporary reality but a permanent state of existence that we are to strive for.  Therefore, we are to seek to live in this reality all of the time and everywhere.  This is precisely what it means to obey and why we are to obey the Greatest Commandment. 

Reflections on 1 John 3:15

"Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him."

What a seemingly bizarre line of thought!  How can hatred be the same as murder? 

Today, we only think of murder in physical terms because we don’t really view human beings as anything more than physical beings.  In John’s day and in his line of thought, though, this was not the case.  He understood that there is a greater depth to what it means to be a human being and that depth is what the later Church Fathers came to call "personhood."  They understood that we are formed through our relationships and shaped by them.  Our inner being is formed through the relationships we inhabit and it is our relationships that have a heavy hand in making us who we are.  Whenever someone cuts us out of their lives and degrades us because of their hatred for us, it will misshape us and can diminish our personhood.  Hatred always wants to undo us.  This is why bullying, for example, is so terrible.  In John’s line of thought, it is equivalent to the murder of personhood.  It seeks to destroy that which is so unique and irreplaceable in the person; their inner being, their unique self. 

Reflections on 1 John 3:16

"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters."

Love, as a Way of life, does not originate with us or in us.  It is revealed to us.  It is manifested through Jesus Christ and His actions towards us.  Since God is love, it takes a revelation from God for us to know what love is and how we can live in it.  This revelation is Jesus Christ.  Christ revealed the inner reality of the Trinitarian communion in the Way He has acted towards and for us.  He has revealed that the Triune communion (Father, Son and Holy-Spirit) consists of its members living in sacrificial love for one another.  This is what love is.  Whenever we begin to lay down our lives for one another, we to begin living in the Way of the Triune God, who is love.