Get hungry for lent: lent's fasting, prayer, and almsgiving ought to open our eyes to what's happening in the world around us. Maybe it's time to "give up" a little more than chocolate.

We Catholics who live in the United States may be coming to this Ash Wednesday 2005 a little grimmer than we were last year, and rightly so. We who think it worth a few moments to have our heads smeared with a bit of ash are likely to be people who give the gospel more than token attention.

If so, then we've probably noticed that, since we met here last year, the rich have gotten richer, the poor poorer. This is true both locally and worldwide.

We've probably also noticed that day after day the worst is being confirmed about the effects of our rapid consumption of the earth's stored energy on the warming globe, a burden that will fall ultimately on our children and theirs.

And we've had to notice that the tragedy of 9/11 has been used as an excuse to defy treaties and international law regarding the making of war, the treatment of prisoners, and the protection of human dignity. We've noticed that the American parts of us are increasingly being asked to agree that whether "might makes right" or not, it makes us feel safe and keeps the wealth and sweat of the world pretty much at our disposal.

And it's hard to deny that we are being pushed ever closer to identifying happiness with economic security, or at least with what comedian George Carlin used to call "our stuff."

We may even have noticed what we don't notice any longer: that it isn't fashionable to speak as if everyone on this earth has the same rights to life, food, clean water, safety, work, and a future as we do.

And it's hard to miss that the American empire's bright new clothes are being advertised as having some sort of Christian trademark woven right into them.

The more we have noticed such things (to say nothing of the ecclesial side of American Catholic life in these years), the grimmer we are likely to be this season. But Ash Wednesday and all of Lent may pass us and all our grimness by.

Just when we need Lent most, we don't know we need it. Many of us have forgotten or never experienced why our tribe has these Forty Days.

Nobody does it alone

Ramadan, the Jewish High Holy Days, tribal times of initiation, Lent: None of them happens between 10 a.m. and noon one day a week. None of them happens while the individual, family, or community calendar drives people's lives on and on. Ramadan, High Holy Days, Lent: They happen when they are respected. They happen when they are honored in the lives of the faithful.

It has been said so well: "It isn't that the Jews keep the Sabbath! The Sabbath keeps the Jews." That is the clearest telling of the relationship between a people and their rites. It isn't so much that we keep Lent; the truth is that Lent, even a Lent feebly kept by us, then keeps us, makes us, shapes us, marks us, names us.

And Lent is a rite. It may be a thousand small rites, but the whole is a ritual deed of our tribe. This has been enlivened in our lifetime by the final stages in the initiation of adults in our parishes. But that process is something of a mockery unless these folks are being initiated into a vital entity, into a church that is right now mightily engaged in the Lenten practices that, not surprisingly, we share with many other religious people in the world: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

And so we baptized have our Lent, our Forty Days. And they don't belong to popes and bishops or any other group or class. Even on Ash Wednesday itself, even a week after Ash Wednesday, even on Palm Sunday, it isn't too late to claim what is our common Catholic inheritance.

But "common" is the required word there. Lent, like all the rituals of baptized people, is common, communal, the work of the body. Only those who trivialize it would take it on alone. The gospel weighs too much for that. Who could bear it alone? But two together, or a half dozen, or a roomful, or a whole assembly? Then we're ready.

Ready for what? To get into shape. To go into training. To engage the tempter. To test the waters. To look where we haven't liked to look. To go where we haven't gone.

To pray. To fast. To give alms.

Sunday stories

All of Lent's praying flows from and back to our Sunday Eucharist. There we rehearse Lent's sounds for use all week long, the melodies and the words that are strong enough to bear Lent's weight. In the Sunday assembly we enter into the intercession and the prayer for mercy that is intense during Lent, both in the assembly and at home. And this pondering of God's mercy is ever linked to praising and thanking God for the Passover mystery into which we have been baptized and of which we partake as a holy communion.

These assemblies are where we hear our stories, ever before us, ever able to engage us. Lent's Sunday readings this year have us pondering Eve and Adam before that blessed tree, Jesus as a new Jacob wrestling in the wilderness, Abraham and Sarah setting out so naively, the chosen people asking a never-really-answered Exodus question ("Why didn't we stay slaves?"), an honest woman from the wrong side of the tracks in lively conversation at the village well, old Samuel pouring the oil all over handsome David, an eloquent ex-blind man, Ezekiel's valley of bones, the four-days-dead man and his amazing sisters.

All this plus the sometimes brilliant, sometimes obtuse bits from Paul, ever struggling to figure out flesh and spirit, darkness and light, faith and works, sin and grace. It seems that at some level he did figure it out: They aren't opposite poles, they're related.

Will all these words leap off the pages to take hold of us, to bring forth some first-rate preaching and some open conversation?

Hungry for what?

Fasting, then, what is it about? Bottomline answer: hunger for the reign of God. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice" (Matt. 5:6). No accident the gospel writer used those verbs.

The fasting of Lent may take on a hundred different expressions, but the work it needs to do is to strip us of all that keeps us from being gospel hungry. What in our lives do we need to put aside that we may clear our sight and see, clear our palate and taste, clear our ears and hear, clear even our sense of smell and long for what Paul calls the fragrance of Christ?

Lent is learning to be a hungry Christian, part of the basic job description. It may well be that for many this must relate in part to food and drink, what and how much. We might eat lower on the food chain, choose a much more limited menu and a lot of repetition, with a real effort to take time to savor both preparation and taste (and gain insight into our normal eating habits).

We might choose never to eat in a hurry. We might daily ponder why it is that the world raises enough food for everyone to eat adequately but it doesn't get shared. We could find out why.

We might remove all the notes and pictures from the refrigerator door and put there one large page with these words of South American journalist Eduardo Galeano: "When people are starving, it is not food that is in short supply, it's justice."

We who are not poor, not hungry, cannot by fasting share the lot of those who are. But we can turn the attention and energy that hunger gives us to what Galeano says.

The martyred Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero in his Lenten homilies pointed out the difference between the fasting of the wealthy and the constant hunger of those who are poor: "For those who eat well, Lent is a call to austerity, a call to give away in order to share with those in need. But in poor lands, in homes where there is hunger, Lent should be observed in order to give to the sacrifice that is everyday life the meaning of the cross.... Feeling in one's own flesh the consequences of sin and injustice, one is stimulated to work for social justice and a genuine love for the poor."

In another place Romero spoke directly to those of us who have and consume so much of the world's wealth, we who are rich: "The rich must be critical amid their own surroundings of affluence: why they are wealthy, and why next door there are so many poor. A wealthy Christian will find there the beginning of conversion, in a personal questioning: Why am I rich, and all around me so many that hunger?" These seem at first painful statements, painful questions. And they are. What did we expect?

More than charity

Before all else then, the fasting we do in Lent is about this love for the poor and thus the hunger for justice to be done. Justice, not charity. And that is one very difficult step. Seeing the ever greater division between the few rich and the many poor, some would argue that our alms are but a whiff of incense to mask the moral stench. We seem unable to break out of the "bootstrap" model, and we think well of ourselves when we set aside 5 or 10 percent "for the poor."

Yes, the poor need that, but recognize what seems to have been pretty clear to Christians in the first few centuries of the faith: It isn't your money you are giving away! It's theirs! The fourth-century bishop St. Basil the Great didn't beat around the bush: "The bread in your cupboard belongs to the one who is hungry. The coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it.... The money that you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help but fail to help."

But that kind of charity isn't the Lenten Christian's hunger for justice. Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez puts the Lenten challenge this way: "The poor do not exist as an act of destiny, their existence is not politically neutral or ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.... The poverty of the poor is ... a demand for the construction of a new social order." We have to find our hunger for that new social order.

This hunger isn't some poor imitation of malnourishment. Yes, we can shape a Lenten eating practice, but we will need other sorts of fasting to focus our sight on justice. What do we read? What do we watch? What eats away at our days? What can we learn in Lent's short time about all the consuming we do? What stock can we take of our way of living that might unbind us and let us go a little more free?

There is the truth that some of us may need to hear: Lent isn't about suffering; it is about freedom. It is about discovering the sources of real joy in our lives. Maybe not "discovering" them, but being discovered by them when we fast.

Another secret some of us need to know though we might not believe it until we get there: Most of what we take on for Lent isn't done so we can let it go at Easter. At least some of what we take on we may well want to stay with because of how it has set us free, cleared our sight, brought us joy. Sore, of Lent will be an intensity we can't bear all year round, but some of it we'll cling to with delight when Easter comes.

What other hungers are we to feel? How does one become hungry for the survival of the earth? Our normal hunger, which w( quickly feed, is to use up the earth and its minerals and waters and land.

Just do it!

How do we know this different hunger, this hunger to live wisely with the earth? We are told more and more urgently by scientists that the time for making major changes is short. For the people of the church, what has that got to do with the keeping of Lent? What fasting are we to do? What clarity are we seeking about our own decisions and the decisions of all political bodies of which we are a part?

It isn't simply, "How can I do less damage to the earth, use up less of the earth?" That's a good start, but these are matters where we need experts and we need politics and we need plans. Not every one can do everything. How does this parish, this school, this discussion group connect? How can we get into some good habits, virtues that will take shape in Lent and maybe last on and on?

In such ways the three Lenten disciplines always start to run together--our fasting, our almsgiving, our prayer. Yes, alms will always be needed for the immediate help of so many in need. Get over feeling good about such sharing. Do it, do it all the time, but recognize that we need also to give alms of our time and our energy and our ability if we are to make a difference.

This supposedly harmless notion of almsgiving is Lent's secret. It might start with the tithe but it is really about the revolution, about the great question the gospel places over the whole notion of "private" and "mine." Lent gets down deep so that we finally see that the alms required of us are stopping this runaway train we're on.

Who could sustain this without taking part in the church's prayer? Without daily attention to the scriptures, to the psalms, to intercession? Who could sustain this alone! That "alone" has been the downfall of the church's season of Lent. We tried to do it alone and we trivialized the whole thing. Now we must do it together: the prayer by Day and night, the fast that clears our sight, the alms that set things right.

By GABE HUCK, the director of Liturgy Training Publications in Chicago from 1977 until 2001. He now lives in New York City.