The Root of Christian Abnegation

‘He said unto them, Can ye make the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?” — Lux vy. 34,

IT is a curious question how the idea of fasting came to be associated with religion. I take

the reason to be that every religion involves sacrifice. But where the error lies is in the belief that the root of sacrifice is pain. The root of sacrifice is joy. Examine the sacrifices that men make in this world. You will find that those who make them are enduring the cross and despising the shame for a joy that is set before them. Ask the artist if he considers himself to be fasting when he scorns delights and lives laborious days. He will tell you, “No, I abstain by reason of my satisfiedness; my mind is filled with a picture, and I have no appetite for a repast.” Ask the merchant why

he spends so many hours without food. He will tell you it is precisely because he does not feel the fast — because another fulness makes him unconscious of it. Ask a pair of lovers why they sit out in the wet without even an umbrella, endangering thereby the health of their own bodies. They will tell you that they never knew it was raining at all, that the discomfort of the body was blunted by the comfort of the soul. And this explains the seeming contradiction in Christianity. On the one hand Christ tells us to take up His cross; on the other He bids us enter into His joy. How reconcile these precepts? Very easily. No man can successfully take up a cross until he has entered into a joy. I bear my cross for something or for somebody. I bear my Christian cross for the sake of the bridegroom. I am never so far from fasting as in that moment of sacrifice. My fast would begin if something prevented me from taking up that cross. That is what I understand Christ to mean when He says, “I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how I am straitened until it be accomplished!” He wanted to get all His burden at once; He was hungry for want of it. All the world was keeping Him from the service of His love. It wanted to make Him a king, to crown Him with temporal glory. It was as if you tied the wings of a bird. His love hungered for humiliation, sighed for surrender, panted for expression, longed for lavishment, thirsted to wear its object’s thorn. His meat and His drink was to do the will of His Father.

Lord, give me the root of sacrifice — fill me with love! I cannot sacrifice if life is to me a poor thing; not from my fasting but from my fulness comes my power to give. I cannot toil for the sake of toil; I must have dance-music. I thank Thee that there is so much dance-music in the world. My hand would long since have been paralysed if my heart did not beat time to it. I have often wondered that it was in Thy moment of greatest joy the men on the mount spake of Thy decease to be accomplished. I do not wonder now; the “law of the spirit of life” has explained it. Thy sacrifice came from Thy heart’s glow, not from its ashes. Is it not written that of Thy fulness we have all received! It is not Thy emptiness that has made us rich, O Christ; it is Thy fulness — the joy of Thy love. I too would tread that royal way. Hast Thou for me some arduous work in store. Not by a fast, but by a feast, do Thou prepareme! Bring me up to the hill-top ere I travel through the hollows! Flood me with the sunshine ere [ move to the sacrifice! Fan me with the breezes ere I face the burden! Cheer me with the song ere I meet the silence! Make me rich in love that I may lose myself! Show me life’s splendour that I may spend myself! Put a crown on my head that I may bear a cross in my heart! Fill me with hope, and I shall endure hardness. Tell me man’s value, and I shall brave the vale. It is they who see the kingdom that are poor in spirit, for it is the optimist that is the offerer, and he who breasts the gloom is he who beholds the

glory.