Baxter should be on a diet. He does eat “weight control” food, but all it seems to do is maintain his portly physique. I have tried lowering the amount he eats each day to below the half cup allotment, but then he becomes intolerable to live with. Between the mournful cries and the incessant rubs on my legs and paws to my arms, I can’t do anything else but give him attention. Of course, that’s the point of these antics. “Wear him down until he can’t stand it any longer and gives up more grub.” Cats are always conniving to get their way. And as his weight maintenance shows, Baxter usually does get his way.
Dieting is a part of our culture in America. It is constantly changing with the latest fad diet, but it never seems to go away. Maybe because the statistics tell us we are overweight as a nation, we are always looking for the next way to fix it. But we want to do so without any pain and sacrifice, without any significant changes to our life style, while retaining all the pleasures fattening foods give us minus the calories. We keep looking for the “perfect” remedy for our weight problem, but none seems to last. So we go from fad diet to fad diet without losing a pound, but confident that the simple solution is just around the next weight loss commercial.
Lent does not call us to diet. It calls us to fast. There’s a big difference. We diet to become physically thinner, but we fast to become spiritually richer. We fast to heighten our awareness of many aspects of our life where God has a point to make for us. Fasting shows us that we don’t need all that we think we need, not all the food or possessions or pleasures we think make us happy. We need less because they contain so much more than we take account of when we use them. Savoring a meal makes it last longer and satisfies us more than fast food consumption that quells the hunger in ten minutes, but brings it back in two hours. Having a few quality products around to use or wear allow us to appreciate workmanship where human labor cooperates with the Creator rather than mass production that often makes the worker into a machine for profit. Picking one’s pleasures allow us to absorb their beauty and gratification more deeply as a sign of God’s goodness and grace, rather than simply indulging ourselves in fleeting satisfactions than wear off quickly, leaving us looking for more.
We fast to intensify our appetites so that less can truly be more, as we grow to understand that a rich life comes with the quality it holds rather than the quantity it amasses. We don’t need as much as we think we do, but we do need more from what we have by experiencing it as God’s gift given for us to know how generous God is. Finally, fasting comes down to making us grateful for what life brings us, even the bitter fruit, for it all nourishes our soul through the mystery of how God saves us.
Baxter should go on a diet, but he probably won’t. He likes the satisfaction food gives him too much, and he doesn’t intend to lose it. He is a slave to his creaturely desires. We need to fast a little this Lent from food or possessions or creaturely pleasures to free us from such desires and to know how good God is to us. Then we will be ready for the glorious feast of Easter, where God took a criminal, thought the least among us, and showed Him as the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
