Monday March 14, 2011

Matthew 4:1-2

"Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry."

This verse has always made me want to laugh. Whenever I hear it in Church or Bible studies or class or anything - I can't help smiling in amusement. "He fasted for forty days and forty nights and afterward he was hungry." Well, I guess He would be.

Of course, He presumably fasted by eating very little rather than completely starving himself. My patron saint Catherine of Siena didn't last long on her full hunger strike to end the Great Schism. Gandhi nearly died for his.

Perhaps that's why "everything in moderation" is actually, for me, a hard practice to enact. I tend to be a person of extremes, I think. If I hadn't given up playing that silly game on my phone for Lent, I would be playing it to excess. Even in such a small thing, I have a very limited capacity to make myself able to play it only occasionally, when I am waiting for my friend to meet me at the rendezvous and really have nothing else to do or in the car when I'm a passenger. I worry that my flexible opinions and beliefs also swing wildly from one direction to another if I'm convinced.

I have to make stark lines, even if they are very fine ones. To have subtlety I have to create a series of lines in gradations, a complex negotiation. I'm not very good at it. It's why I'm not very good at flirting - because I try so hard not to be overt that I am unreadable.

I think I simplify things too much in this way. Because something in my brain does not recognize anything but not eating for forty days and forty nights as the definition of fasting - as a reason to be so very tempted to turn the stones into bread.

I don't ask others to live by those rules, but I do wonder if it helps or hurts my morality in general. The true baselines of my faith and my life don't change. But the direction in which they are applied is largely an "all or nothing" fashion.

Perhaps the most troublesome thing about this tendency of mine is that I miss the subtleties of other people. That I forget to take into account everything I should. Look at my post yesterday, about anything you've suffered explaining rather than excusing bad behavior. I don't waffle on that principle, but I hope that I will always have the grace to remember the explanations and judge less harshly lest I be judged.

Lord God, who denied Himself in the desert, please be with me when I make my decisions and judgments. Guide me to see others fairly and generously. Help me to always find the truth and follow Your path in my opinions. Grant me the wisdom to know when I should be dogged and when I should be conciliatory. Grant me Your grace and wisdom, my Lord.