Remembering Hunger
By
Mary Ann Dimand

Christian churches often usher Lent in with Joel 1:14’s call to community fasting and Matthew 4 or Luke 4’s account of Jesus’s hungry time of testing in the wilderness, because of the long tradition of giving something up for Lent.

For centuries, fasting has been a mode of prayer. For centuries in Europe and North America, Lenten fasting coincided with the time when winter food supplies ran low, and its breaking (ideally) with new spring greens, the return of eggs from domestic fowl and milk from cattle. In this way the fast spiritualized both necessity and its relaxation.

Recently, among our well-fed classes, a Lenten fast has often served as a weight-loss regime, or a time to shed one bad habit or other. I’ve often heard practitioners call imperfect adherence to a fast, failure.

Perhaps a Lenten fast can serve any number of purposes and have many meanings.

Myself, I think that when we fast we can practice remembrance. Finding ourselves reaching for something we are practicing doing without—we remember our God, as we remember our fast. Or realizing too late that we forgot our fast, we remember our finiteness and weakness. Or choosing to break our fast for some appetite it scants, we remember how often we choose what is not God.

Perhaps most of all, for those of us well-fed, we remember what hunger (and not the more tenuous ambition) is, helping us to know what we hunger for above all.

Mary Ann Dimand is an elder in full connection with the Rocky Mountain Conference of the United Methodist Church and a graduate of the Iliff School of Theology.

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