Ukrainian Orthodoxy		Orthodoxie ukrainienne

Reaching out to touch someone: Prayer and fasting as social ministry

Dr. Alexander Roman alex.roman@unicorne.org

The Great Fast is a time when we, as Christians, "plug in" to the well-springs of the Holy Spirit. With Christ, we too enter the desert to be alone with God. Prayer and fasting, along with charitable deeds, are the key elements of our spiritual training. At the same time, these should not be so much "inward looking," as they should be tools we can use to touch the lives of others in Christ - but how so?

Like the proverbial blacksmith with his hammer, we open ourselves to the Holy Trinity to set us aflame with Divine Love and reshape us into a form that more closely resembles the Image of Christ we are all called to become.

There is what appears to be a lot of "individualism" in the Church's prayer. For example, the Creed sung at the Liturgy is sung as part of what "I believe." The Jesus Prayer, even though it can be said using the plural, usually asks the Lord to have "mercy on me, a sinner."

Yet, this so-called individualism in worship has, and always had, a wider, social dimension within the Church.

We are, after all, members of the Body of Christ. We never pray alone, as a result. The prayers of the Church benefit us, just as our own praying exerts a beneficial influence over others and the world, as a matter of fact.

We are truly members of a "Royal Priesthood" and "Priests, Prophets and Kings" called to live a life in faith, hope and love, sealed with God's love through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

When we pray, we pray for ourselves and for the needs of the world. Our prayer for ourselves, although it may start out with petitions for "things," will, in time, be transformed into our wish to be conformed to God's Will in all things. We will cry out to the Lord to experience the Presence of Christ in our lives in the midst of suffering that will make it bearable and to allow the Mercy of the Oil of the Spirit to fill the empty vessels of our souls.

We are called to pray and offer worship to God, it is our first responsibility in faithfulness to our high calling as Christians.

Praying and sacrificing for others' spiritual and material good is part of our vocation as the Royal Priesthood, the "Laos" or People of God.

Our prayer is joined to that of Christ and the Communion of Saints. What immense power, then, is at our disposal to achieve good in society and the world!

Prayer is not, cannot be, a substitute for action on our part. Prayer is there to help us obtain the needed spiritual strength and inspiration to act on behalf of others in the way that Christ desires us to act and from the best possible motives. Without being joined through prayer and fasting to Christ, the True Vine, we really can do nothing!

There are also many things in the world that need our prayers, about which we can do nothing except pray. And it is in moments like those that we see how powerful our prayer can be. We call on God to fill in our weakness and bring our good intentions to fulfillment in the lives of others, even around the world, who suffer and need our love.

Perhaps we will get a request for prayer as part of an e-mail on our computer. At that moment, we can do no better than to put our hand on our screen as we sincerely ask God's Holy Mercy to intervene in the life or lives of those who have asked us to pray for them. This happened to me this very week with a friend who is a frequent visitor to this website. I haven't been the same since and I highly recommend this practice to everyone!

Fasting is a great help to prayer. By denying ourselves creature comforts and even necessities, we suffer with Christ, experience more intimately His Presence, and come to realize how we will experience the next life, when everything we consider so important in our lives will be taken away from us.

The emptiness we feel in the act of fasting is to be filled up with prayer, meditation, spiritual reading and love for others as we make, as St John Chrysostom said, what we deny ourselves into relief for the poor!

For those, like me, who are diabetics and follow other special dietary restrictions, "being good" with respect to our diets is penance enough, thank you very much!

With respect to fasting and denying ourselves, one could say that the most important things that we should absolutely reject has little to do with food, however.

We should reject the notion, often deep-seated, that we are ourselves unworthy of forgiveness and love.

Unless we can learn to forgive ourselves, how can we hope to understand the Lover of Humankind in His condescension to us as Man and as the Man of Sorrows?

A good meditation for the Great Fast is, as one monk once told me, to think on how Christ loves us as individuals. How Christ, when He was on the earth, clearly held me in His love, even though I was not yet born. How He suffered and died for me on the Cross. God Incarnate can do this, as the Saints affirm.

He who created us, calls us each by our own name. He calls us now, even though our busy-ness and sinfulness prevents us from hearing His call. And yet there are those who do hear Him. And we too may hear Him in our hearts. Perhaps the exercise of the Great Fast is, after all, an effort aimed at improving our hearing of the Divine in our lives!

The Pilgrim in the "Way of the Pilgrim," after reciting the Jesus Prayer so many thousands of times, said, in the end, that he began to "listen to it" to the power in the Name of Jesus.

And it was St Seraphim of Sarov who best summed up the aim of spirituality for us: "Acquire the spirit of peace and a thousand souls will be converted around you."

The Great Fast is a wonderful time for us to become more attuned the workings of the Holy Spirit around us and through us.

As we participate in the spiritual activity and Energy of the Great Fast, let us listen to the Voice of God within. Let us be on the lookout for the myriad ways God can and will use us as blessings to others.

God will achieve this in spite of our weaknesses. But He won't act without our love and openness to His power in our lives and in the lives of others.

Let me take this opportunity on behalf of all of us at "Ukrainian Orthodoxy" to wish our readers a blessed Great Fast!

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