Lent: Fasting to Confront our Destructive Passions

“Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.” -Colossians 3:5 (NASB)

The Apostle Paul calls us to consider ourselves dead our passions. Passions are things that drive us, that cause us to suffer (the basic meaning of “passion”). In our day we often employ the term “passion” in a positive sense—a passion for reaching the hungry, a passion for Jesus. These are the things that motivate our lives and drive us to seek and serve and the Lord.

At the time of the writing of the New Testament and the early centuries of the Church, however, “passion” referred primarily to the negative things that drive us. These are the destructive compulsions and addictions of our lives. The early theologian, Evagrius Ponticus, highlighted eight of these compulsions that can take control of our lives: gluttony, lust, greed, anger, inordinate sadness, bored laziness, vanity and pride.

The practices of fasting, giving alms, and prayer confront these destructive passions in our lives. Fasting, in particular, confronts gluttony, lust and greed.

First on the list of destructive passions is gluttony. When gluttony has a hold on us, we eat not just what we need or should properly enjoy in life. Instead, we keep on eating, trying to get more and more pleasure or attempting to fill an empty place in our hearts. Ironically, when we are driven by gluttony, we often eat so quickly that we fail to savor the food in our mouths. Instead, our focus is on “getting more.”

Because eating is essential to life, gaining self-control over the passion of gluttony is foundational to gaining victory over all the destructive passions that seek to control us, asserts Evagrius.

Along with gluttony, lust is a powerful passion in our lives. Both of these are compulsions of desire—we want something, not only to satisfy our physical needs but to try to satisfy an inner compulsion that craves for more and more. Gluttony and lust go hand-in-hand.

Greed is a third passion of desire—concupiscence. God created us to desire, for desire is what draws us out of ourselves to reach out in love toward our Creator and other people. Because of the Fall, however, our desiring faculty (concupiscentia in Latin) has become twisted in on ourselves. Our desiring becomes self-focused and is never satisfied. Our gluttony, lust and greed spring from our inner concupiscence that craves incessantly. Like an addiction, no matter how much we feed it, we grasp for more in order to get our “fix.”

If we can gain victory over food—a basic need of life—we can become free from lust and greed and the underlying bottomless craving of the passions and their demands. Fasting is therefore so important in our lives. It is not that we ourselves gain victory by our will power. Rather, fasting exposes the inner passions. Foregoing food brings the concupiscence to the surface where it can be dealt with. Then we call upon God’s mercy.

Lent is all about acknowledging our fallen nature and crying out for God’s mercy. We can never defeat gluttony, lust and greed by fasting alone. Instead, Lenten fasting helps us face those driving compulsions—those controlling passions—that must be taken to the cross. As they die with Christ on the cross (Romans 6:1-14), we are raised to new life and the Holy Spirit bears the fruit of self-control in us (Galatians 5:1-23). This is the Paschal Mystery of new life.

May we 0pen ourselves anew this Lent to the practice of fasting so that our hidden passions may be exposed and brought to Christ’s passion on the cross. May we than rise with Christ to a transformed life, no longer controlled by inner compulsions but instead free to enjoy God’s blessings, such as food, and free to live our lives fully for our Lord!

© 2018 Glenn E. Myers