On this Fourth Sunday, being the middle of the way and centermost of Lent, when Christ reveals to us in one parable, the entirety of the history of salvation, in what we know as the Parable of the Prodigal Sin. We peer into the eternal banquet, the wedding feast of the Lamb, we should remember that we are not there yet. 
   We are on a journey, up a steep mountain, and we need to “tighten our belts” as food is rationed on this trek. 
   Eating less food is the most essential Lenten fast, and fundamental to our interior life. We can’t be attentive to God when we are stuffing our mouths with grub, or constantly thinking about which of the city’s restaurants we want to “experience.” When your brain tells your body it has to eat, your brain must “delay and pray.” You must tell your body: not just now, darling, and let’s say a few prayers. We can eat later! So: back off on the food and drink!
   But these days we need to fast from something else if we want peace and the love of God. We need to fast from the cursed noise relentlessly vomiting from our devices, especially now that the war is developing in the middle east and the political tensions are growing in the Church and in the world.
   Whet we should understand is that the primacy of God’s wisdom over human wisdom bears on the current question of the Church’s challenges and the military strike against the Iranian regime. God’s Church teaches that war must be a last resort, after all possible diplomatic negotiations have failed. War is an evil so great that scarcely any other evil justifies it. If men use only their own intellects, however, they will frequently resort to war; if men use their intellects assisted by God’s counsels, war will be a relatively rare occurrence in human history.  Therefore, we must tune our intellects and attention to God’s teaching and wisdom. We must fast not only from food, but from noise. 
   Every person is made in the image and likeness of God, and every person is Jesus: this is the bottom line of today’s parable: Who do you perceive in the Thou? The Father perceived the beloved sons, yet the sons perceived something else in the father and in one another. God, I pray, help me to unplug my heart to see You in every person!
   During my four days in Paris this past summer, I took all sorts of public transport: city buses, underground metro, surface trains, and lots of sidewalks. 90% of the people in the busses and trains were staring at their phones, many with ears plugged up. And yet, how beautiful they were, even in their zombielike state. How beautiful is the City of 
Paris and of Cincinnati! Beauty is all around us, especially in other people, made in His image and likeness. So let us abstain, not only from meat, but from noise. Let us fast, not only from food, but from artificially generated images and sounds. As the Desert Fathers would say, look up, not down!