SOUL FOOD:

“Sorry to speak from an Atheist’s POV, but how does God help in a time like this? Is he handing out free money?” The question was posed via the Internet to CNN anchor Don Lemon, who read it on a televised segment called “What You’re Saying.”

Think interactive letters to the editor. “It’s a good question,” Lemon replied to the viewer, identified only by the CNN website screen name “cwoolf.”

If I had the chance, I’d tell cwoolf, “Yes. Yes God is. One way or another, yes, he is. At least if anyone is keeping his commandment, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. [And] Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Maybe, as an atheist, cwoolf is unaware of the religious practice of giving alms — money, food or other things freely given to relieve the poor.

About mid-February I noticed a news release on Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange website. In it, the bishop of the diocese, the Most Rev. Tod D. Brown, offered a few words of Lenten guidance.

He urged Catholics, during Lent, “to focus on more than abstinence.” Noting the current state of our economy, he encouraged the faithful to “reach out to those struggling with unemployment, the burdens of debt and housing insecurity.”

“Kudos to the bishop,” I remember thinking. These are indeed desperate times for a growing number of our neighbors, especially if you define “neighbor” as Jesus did in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. (See the Gospel Luke, chapter 10 verses 25-37, if you aren’t familiar with this story.)

Christians are, I think, always beholden to minister to those in need. Jesus and the prophets relentlessly preached care for the poor, the sick and the forgotten.

Jesus spoke of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, of taking the stranger in. When we do these things, he said, we, at heart, also do them for him.

Given that and our present economic predicament, I’ve been calling churches since the first of the year to ask what the pastor might be teaching or what others might be doing in terms of aid and support for those in distress.

With one exception at this point, I’ve been told, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” So it raised my spirits to read Brown’s instructions “to carry on the generous and charitable mission of Christ during these difficult times.”

Just after Ash Wednesday I read a story about a service Brown officiated at Santa Margarita High School. There — alluding both to the Lenten practice of fasting, or abstinence, among Christians and the deprivations suffered in our now faltering economy — he told the students, “For many, Lent began long ago.”

I share the bishop’s concern for those who need our compassion and help. But, while likening their loss to the fasting of Lent is lovely rhetoric, it bothered me.

Loss and deprivation are not the same as the voluntary surrender of what we could or do possess. The first are foist upon us; the latter is done — or not — at will.

Christian fasting emulates that of Jesus in his own 40-day fast in the wilderness as he readied himself for public ministry. It’s an exercise of self-control that strengthens us to better live in accord with the will of God.

The headline of another story about Brown’s advice also gave me pause. “Give instead of going without,” it proclaimed. But that is not what the bishop said.

The story quotes the same words from the bishop I read in the Diocese of Orange news release: “It is important to focus on more than abstinence during this holy Lenten period.”

Nowhere did Brown say to focus on giving instead of abstinence. The crux of the matter is that fasting from food and drink, in and of itself, is not enough.

As Father Stephen Doktorczyk at St. Joachim Church in Costa Mesa wrote shortly after Ash Wednesday for the Daily Pilot, “Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are the pillars of Lent.” All three.

Take away any one of the three and you have the equivalent of a two-legged stool. Or worse.

The Church Fathers called fasting without prayer “the fast of the demons,” since, because of their incorporeal nature, demons do not eat. But they don’t pray either.

This was not meant to diminish the place of fasting in Lent. St. Ignatius Briantchaninov wrote that while prayer is the chief of Christian virtues, “their foundation is fasting.”

Our present age tends to reject fasting, along with curbing other excesses. Maybe it’s the influence of secular mantras such as, “If it feels good, do it,” and “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

Many of us seem willing to believe that prayer, meditation or positive thinking can affect our health and circumstances. Yet we resist the notion that decadence is detrimental to our spiritual well-being.

Some of us reduce human nature to our bodies and minds, denying spirit. Others view the body as a temporary encumbrance, beyond this world unessential to who we are.

But Christianity, which is grounded on the bodily resurrection of Jesus — and, through his, our own — has no place for this or any other sort of dualism that dismisses the body as dispensable or ephemeral.

“Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,” wrote St. Paul the apostle, “Glorify God with your body.” In Christianity, human nature is a package deal.

As are what Doktorczyk called the pillars of Lent: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. In an essay titled, “The Meaning of the Great Fast: The True Nature of Fasting,” written by Mother Mary and Bishop Kallistos Ware, they recall how, in the Gospels, the devil is cast out — not by fasting or prayer alone — but by fasting and prayer.

“Fasting,” they write, “is valueless or even harmful when not combined with prayer.”

They remind us of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt. 25: 31-46), which tells us that in the coming judgment what counts will be “the amount of help that we have given to those in need” not “the strictness of our fasting.”

Yes, cwoolf, God does help in times like these. If, through fasting, prayer and giving alms, his heart’s desire becomes ours.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.