Good. It was Ash Wednesday. You were supposed to be.
Ash Wednesday is one of two days of mandatory fast under current Church law. (The other is Good Friday.) Neither day of fasting is severe. In fact, the reduction in food required by law is quite mild.
This is not how it has always been, though. There used to be many more days of customary fasting in Lent. In fact, you basically had to fast for the whole of Lent under universal law.
Sometimes fasting has also been much more severe than it is now.
And that’s okay. There is no one right way to do fasting, and the same amount is not always suitable for everybody in every time and every place, which makes it a good thing that Christ didn’t mandate a particular amount of manner of fasting for his followers. He simply said
And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you [Matt. 6:16-18].
The general manner in which Jesus addressed fasting allowed his Church to adjust the requirements of fasting to meet the changing needs of society.
It’d be really hard–in a developed society today–to mandate a whole month of severe fasting for the entire populace.
For example, if you required people to fast all day and only eat at night then people would get up (or stay up) to eat before it was light and then be tired during they day, perform their job duties sluggishly from lack of sleep and food, and then drive home at 90 miles an hour in a hunger-induced panic to get their evening meal, causing bunches of traffic accidents.
If the only fasting requirement was that you not eat during the day then people would gorge themselves at night, actually gain weight during the month of fasting, and make each night a sleepless Mardi Gras, figuring they’d sleep on the weekends.
How do I know this?
BECAUSE IT’S WHAT HAPPENS IN SAUDI ARABIA EVERY RAMADAN.
Unfortunately, the specificity with which Muhammad is held to have mandated the Ramadan fast makes it difficult or impossible to adapt the institution to the needs of a modern society.
It’s easy for us today to look at the Ash Wednesday and Good Friday fasts as not very much to ask–perhaps even too little to ask–but more severe fasting for long periods of time causes its own problems. It’s one thing to keep a strict fast when the pace of life is slow and you’re in a pre-industrial society and don’t have to get behind the wheel of a car while you’re ravening with hunger.
But those kinds of long, more severe, society-wide fasts are not suited to the living conditions we find ourselves in today in much of the world.
Whether or not the Church always adapts its laws on these matters wisely, I’m so glad that the Church has the Christ-given freedom to adapt them.
