By J.D. Long-García | March 5, 2009 | The Catholic Sun

Dorothy Day and two of her friends went to a New York restaurant some 50 years ago. It was Lent.

Day, a journalist well known for her social activism and for founding the Catholic Worker movement, was a devout Catholic convert.

One of the friends, a young woman, was consumed with the discipline of self-denial. So, at the end of their meal, Day ordered a piece of pie.

“The young woman was aghast,” said Patrick Jordan, managing editor of Commonweal magazine and the editor of “Dorothy Day: Writings from Commonweal,” who knew Day in her later years.

“Then Dorothy ate the pie in front of her, with apparent delight,” he said. “When I heard the story, I had a sense that this was Dorothy not as a glutton or debunker, but as a teacher.”

You see, Day fully embraced Christ’s example of prayer and fasting, Jordan said.

“She was saying to the woman: outward observance is not the point, and least of all, the pride such observance might lead to,” he said. “The point was love.”

The Church throws the true meaning of fasting into sharp relief for Catholics during Lent. Many of the faithful in the Phoenix Diocese are seeking to make this 40-day liturgical season a journey to Christ.

Giving something up

Heidi Stamp, a parishioner at Our Lady of Joy in Carefree, asked each of her six children to give something up. But she also stressed that the purpose of Lent is to “come closer to the Lord and grow in virtue.”

In addition to giving up sweets, Stamp’s 9-year-old son, John Paul, said he’d be nicer to his brother and be obedient to his parents.

“When you practice your virtue, your prayer life increases,” Stamp said. “When your prayer life increases, you practice your virtue. It’s a cyclical thing. You need both.”

Deacon Craig Hintze of St. Mary Parish in Chandler also underscored that prayer is fundamental.

“It’s OK to be afraid of fasting. We don’t need to fast for prolonged periods of time to receive eternal life,” he said, noting that Catholics are called to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

“But we do need to pray every single day,” the deacon said. “We need sanctifying grace to enter the kingdom. We receive that grace through prayer.”

Deacon Hintze said the Lenten tradition of giving something up is a good way to grow in prayer.

“They say fasting helps you unite to the hungry,” he said. “Well, I think it helps us get closer to Christ.”

This self-denial is a way of “cleaning out our soul and trying to focus on what’s really important in our lives,” said Poor Clare Sister Marie St. Paul.

“It’s tough, you know, and it’s just a sacrifice that we can give Him because we love Him,” she said. “The detachment focuses you on Him. You can leave behind the less important, the distraction.”

But the detachment isn’t only to material things.

“You don’t want to just focus on candy or coffee or whatever, but you also want to focus on not gossiping or trying to be more charitable or refraining from being mean or angry,” Sr. Marie St. Paul said.

But what if you slip up and eat a candy bar?

“It’s good because it’s humbling,” she said. “You set your goals, but then you can get caught up in the goal and the success. But when you fail, it’s a grace too because you realize your dependence on our Lord. And you try again.”

Pray without ceasing

Fasting and meditating on the Lord’s passion can help Catholics make more time for prayer, Sr. Marie St. Paul said.

“He’s everything for us,” she said. “So you take extra time to go and sit with Him in the chapel or take a minute out of your day to say ‘I love you, Lord’ or ‘Please save souls.’”

And it can be a simple as that.

“When you think of it, say ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I love you,’” Deacon Hintze suggested. “Pray ‘God I love you,’ ‘God have mercy on me’ — short little prayers throughout the day. Through prayer, we poor beggars become rich.”

He also extolled prayer through daily Mass, the rosary and the Stations of the Cross.

“If you get down in the dumps, say a little prayer,” Deacon Hintze said. “God will give us what we need, but we need to ask. We need to pray.”

Fasting as prayer

In 1965, during the last session of the Second Vatican Council, Dorothy Day joined a small group of women at a convent. They fasted for 10 days, her friend Patrick Jordan said, only drinking water.

Day and the others prayed for peace as the council debated the Church’s official teaching on modern war.

“As for me,” Day wrote in The Catholic Worker at the time, “I did not suffer at all from the hunger or headache or nausea which usually accompany the first few days of fast.”

Day, who had offered her fast in part “for the victims of famine,” experienced a different kind of pain, which “seemed to reach into my very bones.”

“God help us, living as we do, in the richest country in the world, and so far from approaching the voluntary poverty we esteem and reach toward,” she wrote. “May we try harder to do more in the future.”

According to Jordan, this kind of thought typifies the life of Dorothy Day. She recognized the complexity of the big issues, incorporated her personal experience, and pledged to do more.

“The fasting and prayer go together, and in prayer there is really joy,” Jordan said. “We shouldn’t get bogged down in ritual. Still, the ritual is meant to be a vehicle to increase our love of God and one another. Let’s hope we can live up to that.”