ON FASTING AND PRAYING IN SECRET
Partly Jesus' warning is against hypocrisy and insincerity, but it is more. There is also the question of what we are radiating and of how we are being perceived. When we display asceticism and piety in public, even if we are sincere, what we want to radiate and what is read by others are often two different things.
We may want to be radiating our faith in God and our commitment to things beyond this life, but what others easily read from our attitude and actions is lack of health, lack of joy, depression, disdain for the ordinary, and a not-so-disguised compensation for missing out on life.
We don't radiate faith in God and health by uncritically accepting or cheerleading the world's every effort to be happy, nor by flashing a false smile while deep down we are barely managing to keep depression at bay. We radiate faith in God and health by radiating love, peace, and calm. And we can't do this by radiating a disdain for life or for the way in which ordinary people are seeking happiness in this life.
That's a tricky challenge, especially today. In a culture like ours, it is easy to pamper ourselves, to lack any real deep sense of sacrifice, to be so immersed in our lives and ourselves so as to lose all sense of prayer, and to live without any real asceticism, especially emotional asceticism.
Among other things, we see this today in our pathological busyness, our inability to sustain lives of private prayer, our growing incapacity to be faithful in our commitments, and in our struggles with addictions of all kinds: food, drink, sex, entertainment, information technology. Internet pornography is already the single biggest addiction in the whole world.
Prayer and fasting (at least of the emotional kind) are in short supply, but we must practice them without public exhibitionism, without disdaining the good that is God-given in the things of this world, without hinting that our own private sanctity is more important to us and to God than is the common good of this planet, and without suggesting that God doesn't want us to delight in his creation.
Our asceticism and prayer must be real, but they must radiate health, and not be a compensation for not having it.
So we need to take more seriously Jesus' words that asceticism and private prayer are to be done "in secret", behind closed doors, so that the face we show in public will radiate health, joy, calm, and love for the good things that God, whom prayer and asceticism brings us closer to, has made.
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