Both the first reading and the Gospel in today’s liturgy speak of fasting. Fasting has a long and honored history in Judeo-Christian religious practice. From its earliest days fasting has always been seen as a means of providing food for the hungry.

Fr. Joseph Donders in his reflection on Ash Wednesday quotes St. Augustine on fasting and mortification: “Don’t believe that fasting suffices. Fasting punishes you, but it does not restore your brother. How many poor people could be nourished by the meal you did not take today?” Donders points out how Augustine reflects the words Isaiah wrote centuries earlier: “Is not this the sort of fasting that pleases me—to share your bread with the hungry?”

It is the practice in some schools during Lent to have a “mite” box on the teacher’s desk. Children would put the money that they saved in the box; money they saved by not taking a soft drink or buying candy. The Far East Mission Society would use the money to buy unwanted babies in China. Fasting would buy these unwanted babies life.

The Church encourages this sort of fasting-for-others during the season of Lent. In a country where poverty holds the many in its grip, fasting-that-others-might-eat can satisfy the faster’s spiritual hunger as well as the physical, and perhaps also the spiritual, hunger of the poor.