✣ Highlights from the week online
Fasting hurts I hate fasting, says Fr Ray Blake. “I get grumpy, I always feel cold and then ill, I get headaches and find it difficult to concentrate and consequently I get easily distracted in and from prayer.” St Thomas Aquinas says that among the reasons for fasting are “to raise the mind to contemplate sublime things” – but “it tends to raise my mind to bacon”; and “to make satisfaction for our sins”: which is true, but “I end up sinning, at least against charity, even more.” Yet even if “the good it does is difficult to perceive”, fasting is worth it. “Fasting for me is an encounter with my own weakness, with my own fragility,” Fr Blake says. “This is really what most forms of Christian asceticism are about. They are concerned with embracing weakness, of actually reducing potency, at least in this world, of accepting the real world where Jesus Christ alone is Lord.” Celibacy in heaven Catholics have marriage as an image of heaven, says Eve Tushnet on Patheos: the wedding feast of the Lamb. “But we also have celibacy as an image of the life of heaven, where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.” On earth, too, “celibates in our role as community-makers can provide a haven for married Christians, including those who struggle or suffer in their marriages, and for those who hope to marry but haven’t been able to yet.” Much of Christian literature – Kristin Lavransdatter, Brideshead Revisited, The Brothers Karamazov – takes place “in the shadow of the monastery: the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Tushnet proposes that we recognise “both marriage and celibate life as images of heaven, where love can be expressed in ways that are equally real, equally intimate, and equally beautiful”. Glory on the Tube Joanna Bogle records “something glorious” that happened to her on a crowded Tube train. “My bulky suitcase got in everyone’s way,” and someone asked what was in it. She explained that it was full of books.“‘They’re prizes for a children’s handwriting and artwork thing: children have to write out the Lord’s Prayer. So many just don’t know it today,’ I said, ‘which seems a pity.’ “‘Well, I know it,’ he said, and began, tentatively at first and then with growing confidence: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven...’ Then others joined in, and then others. A chorus of men’s strong voices, rising above the rattle of the train, in the noisy rush hour, in the heart of London, roaring towards Southwark tube station. ‘Give us this day our daily bread ... forgive us our trespasses...’ and somehow, suddenly, it was a moment of transcendent glory.”
