LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (CNS) — The ultimate goal of fasting during Lent is to draw “us closer in a more regular way to the heart of God,” said Cackie Upchurch, director of the Little Rock Scripture Study.

Fasting is an ancient custom that can be found in almost all religious traditions, she said in an interview with the Arkansas Catholic, newspaper of the Diocese of Little Rock. But “Jesus doesn’t want a typically religious practice just to be taken for granted,” Upchurch said. The important thing is “you do it from the heart,” she said. If the external act of fasting does not reflect “something internal in us” then it is not what God wants, she said.

For Benedictine Abbot Jerome Kodell of Subiaco Abbey, in Subiaco, fasting is a way to gain freedom. This concept is rooted in the Benedictine tradition of the holy hermits of ancient Christianity known as the “desert fathers.” It acknowledges that “the human being is a complicated system, and we don’t always know our motives, and we are not always as free as we think we are.”