“My God, my God, O why have You abandoned me?”
As we enter into Holy Week, for the first time without the celebration of the Mass and public liturgy, we may feel the abandonment that Christ felt on the cross. But just as God transformed Christ’s suffering and death into eternal life for the world, trust in Him to provide grace, strength, and hope for His Church in these difficult times.
In his book Behold the Pierced One, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote about deepening our relationship to the Lord in times of spiritual and physical fasting:
“When Augustine sensed his death approaching, he ‘excommunicated’ himself and undertook public penance. In his last days he manifested his solidarity with the public sinners who seek for pardon and grace through the renunciation of communion… The more I think of it, the more it moves me to reflection. Do we not often take the reception of the Blessed Sacrament too lightly? Might not this kind of spiritual fasting… deepen and renew our relationship to the Body of Christ?
“Since apostolic times… the fast from the Eucharist on Good Friday was a part of the Church’s spirituality of communion. This renunciation of communion on one of the most sacred days of the Church’s year was a particularly profound way of sharing in the Lord’s Passion; it was the Bride’s mourning for the lost Bridegroom (cf. Mk 2:20). Today too… fasting from the Eucharist, really taken seriously and entered into, could be most meaningful on… days of penance—and why not reintroduce the practice on Good Friday?”
“A fasting of this kind… open to the Church’s guidance and not arbitrary—could lead to a deepening of personal relationship with the Lord in the sacrament. It could also be an act of solidarity with all those who yearn for the sacrament but cannot receive it… which would visibly express the fact that we all need that ‘healing of love’ which the Lord performed in the ultimate loneliness of the Cross… Sometimes we need hunger, physical and spiritual hunger, if we are to come fresh to the Lord’s gifts and understand the suffering of our hungering brothers. Both spiritual and physical hunger can be a vehicle of love.”
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