Last week, I began a series of sermons on ancient spiritual practices. “Worship” was the topic of that sermon, a practice that is – more than any other – distinctly communal in nature.
Today, the practice that I’m going to talk about is fasting.
Until just recently, I never thought that I would preach a sermon on fasting. Like many of you, I was aware that many people in the Bible fasted, and that many early Christians fasted, and that there were even some people today – not many, but some – who engaged in the practice of fasting.
The ancient ones I admired, but the modern ones I tended to dismiss as people who took their faith a little too seriously. And I never once considered fasting as an option for myself. What, me fast? Then what? Wearing scratchy wool as a spiritual practice? Or self-flagellation? I think not.
Besides, I thought, wasn’t fasting in ancient times almost a practical necessity? A rough winter here, a famine there; fasting helped one survive. It enabled the food to last a little longer. If you’re going to be fasting anyway, out of necessity, then I guess you might as well make it a spiritual practice.
Today, however, it’s not a practical necessity. Well, not for me, anyway. There’s a grocery store and a number of restaurants in easy walking distance. The house cupboards and the refrigerator are stocked with food. Even on the days when I stand in the kitchen and complain that “there’s nothing to eat,” … there is. Society tells me that I can have whatever I want whenever I want it, without even having to wait for it. So why should I fast? Why should I allow myself to go hungry?
Fasting, it seemed to me, was not a spiritual practice for the 21st century.
Of course, there were some flaws to my thinking. For one thing, there are, of course, people today who do fast out of necessity; that is, they don’t have a choice. They’re hungry, and they have no food.
Also, I had to admit that in the Bible, fasting as a spiritual practice is a choice. Even kings fasted. Surely they didn’t have to. They chose to, despite having a palace full of food. This knowledge, however, did not change my views on fasting. Not right away, anyway.
Then there came a winter in which Ginger accompanied me to the Earl Lectures, a 3-day conference put on by the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. When we lived in northern California, I attended the Earl Lectures every year; although this particular year, because Ginger came with me, I gave up my usual glamorous hotel room at the Berkeley YMCA and instead booked us a bed-and-breakfast not far from where the Lectures were taking place.
We made several trips walking back and forth from the bed and breakfast to the Lectures, and each time we passed by a nice restaurant that, to us, looked very inviting. It was called Café Gratitude, and on our last night in Berkeley, we decided to eat there.
We walked in, and this friendly young man with incredibly long dreadlocks showed us to a table. He handed us menus, and as I began looking it over, I realized what made Café Gratitude unique.
All the food was vegan, meaning there were absolutely no animal products: no meat, no cheese, no eggs, no chicken broth. All the food was grown sustainably, organically, and locally. All the food was live, which mean that it was fresh – not cooked. And, as we soon discovered, all the food was really, really good.
I don’t remember who said it first, Ginger or I, but as we ate, we realized that we could do this. We could make some changes to our diet and become – well, not vegans – but vegetarians at least, which meant that we could still eat eggs and dairy products.
After all, this wasn’t our first vegetarian meal of the week. We were in Berkeley, after all. And we didn’t eat a whole lot of meat at home as it was. We certainly weren’t the type of people who had bacon for breakfast every morning and steak for dinner every night. Making the change wouldn’t be as difficult for us as it might be for some people.
Plus, we knew that there were a number of good reasons to eat vegetarian. Ginger was excited by the potential health benefits of a well-planned vegetarian diet. In fact, once we started the diet, she said she felt better, that she had more energy, than she did when she ate meat.
What appealed to me was the fact that vegetarian diets were easier on the environment, requiring (in most cases) far fewer resources to produce than meat-based diets. I have always tried to reduce my impact on the planet, and going vegetarian was a good way to work toward that.
However, I did decide that I wasn’t going to be too strict about all this. I decided to allow myself to eat meat in certain circumstances. In particular, I would eat meat in response to hospitality shown to me. If someone invited me to their house for dinner, say, I wasn’t going to insist on vegetarian food, and I didn’t want to insult them or make them feel awkward by not eating if there were no vegetarian options. After all, I wasn’t fasting. I was just making some changes to my diet.
More often then not, though, I did have a choice. And when I did, I chose vegetarian. I ate garden burgers at Burger King and grilled cheese and In-N-Out. I didn’t go to McDonald’s.
The most amazing thing, the most surprising thing, about being a vegetarian was how it made me aware; how it made me mindful. So often, we eat a meal, but we don’t even taste it. We don’t savor it or acknowledge it. We don’t give thanks for it. Sometimes, we don’t even chew it.
Not long ago, I was sitting across from someone; we were both eating French fries. She finished hers, but her hand moved over to my fries and she kept eating.
“Hey!” I said. “You’re eating my fries!”
She said, “No, I’m not.”
I said, “Yes, you are – I just saw you eat four or five of my fries.”
She said, “No… I finished my fries, and then, well, OK, I had one of yours.”
I said, “No, I watched you eat five of my fries, one after the other. Do you not even remember eating them?”
I couldn’t be too hard on her. Many times I’ve eaten a meal – just shoveled it in – but my mind was elsewhere, and I’d go to take another bite but the plate was empty, and I’d wonder where my food went.
Did I really just eat all that? Gee, I don’t even remember how it tasted. Was it good? Did I like it? Well, yeah, I guess I must have.
For some reason, when I was a vegetarian, I became a lot more conscious about things like this. Being a vegetarian forced me to actually think about what I was eating. This in turn reminded me of my body, and the holiness of my body, which is the temple for God’s Spirit. This is because, for me, eating a vegetarian diet was a way to honor that holiness. Knowing that my motivation was to reduce the impact on the earth, I felt that the food choices I made connected me to people around the world. Eating with this awareness, I was reminded not only of those who live with hunger and poverty, but of how my everyday decisions can affect their lives, no matter how far away from me they might live.
I was also reminded of where my food comes from. Most meat, I knew, comes from large-scale farms, factories, and slaughterhouses where the conditions are, shall we say, anything but holy. I believed that eating food that came from such places did nothing to honor the holiness that is within me.
And finally, eating a vegetarian diet somehow reminded me to taste my food, to experience the joy of each unique flavor, and to give thanks.
As a result, many of the meals I ate became more meaningful, more fulfilling, more satisfying.
Gradually, after about two years, meat found its way back into my diet. I guess I got tired of fixing separate meals at home. However, I do often choose, even now, to eat a meatless meal when I can.
I’ve talked a lot about eating vegetarian, but technically, giving up meat is not the same as fasting. Fasting is having no food for a set period of time. Being a vegetarian is not fasting; it would more properly be called abstaining – in this case, abstaining from meat. However, my experience did open my mind up to the possibility that perhaps fasting does have a place, even in the 21st century.
And so, when I began reading a book on fasting by Scott McKnight, I was curious. He talks in his book about how fasting is, first a foremost, a response. He makes that very clear. Fasting is a response to a sacred grievous moment. Fasting is not a tool to be used to get what you want. It is not a tool to be used to gain God’s favor. And it is certainly not a tool to help you prepare for swimsuit season. Fasting is something you do in response to a sacred grievous moment.
In the Bible, fasting always refers to food. Fasting usually lasted for a day or less, almost always ending when one ate the evening meal. In Jesus’ time many Jews fasted twice a week, from sunrise to sunset, but the fast always ended in the evening.
So when I read that Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days, I’m not sure exactly what that means. First of all, 40 is a symbolic number in scripture, and I’m not sure if it should be taken literally here. And secondly, while the Bible says that Jesus fasted for 40 days, it doesn’t say anything about the nights. So who knows.
The practice of fasting continued for much of Christian history. John Wesley, to name just one example, fasted every Wednesday and Friday, and was highly critical of those who didn’t.
Since fasting is a response, what is it that fasters are responding to? It could be a death. It could be a conversion. It could be a response to God’s absence, or the awareness of one’s complicity in injustice and suffering. It could be in response to the realization that we need to grow in grace, to shed sins, and to become more loving and holy.
Fasting makes a person more aware, more mindful. It puts a person in tune with what God is doing in that sacred grievous moment.
Fasting is obviously a very bodily practice. Our tendency is to separate the body from the spirit. That may, in fact, be one of our hang-ups about fasting. It involves the body. What does that have to do with the spirit?
We often think of the body as insignificant to a life of faith. But that’s how it was thought of by ancient Jews and Christians. And for some people, fasting helps put body and spirit back together, restoring wholeness to our being.
Actually, fasting can be dangerous when we separate body and spirit. Many people have poor body images, and some will take extreme measures, including extended periods of self-starvation, to have their bodies conform with the image that the culture tells them they should have.
That’s not fasting as a spiritual discipline. That’s an eating disorder that separates the body from the spirit. Neither the body nor the spirit is honored by eating disorders, but fasting as a spiritual practice does honor both body and spirit.
I have done very little actual fasting in my life, and the little fasting that I have done was usually in response to a misunderstanding. Something along the lines of: “I thought lunch was included; I was supposed to bring my own? Well, I guess I’m fasting today.” And for the rest of that afternoon, I’d be aware of an emptiness in my belly; and that hunger, in turn, would make me aware of those whose hunger is far more severe than mine, and also of how grateful I am for the food I do have; and that kind of hunger (the hunger I experienced) and the awareness and the gratitude is never a bad thing.
So what do you think? Are you ready to give it a try? If so, let me know how it goes, because I’m not sure yet how willing I am. If not, then I encourage you to at least think about the food you eat. Think about where it comes from, and how it gets to your place. Pause a moment before you eat, and give thanks.
And then, taste your food. Really taste it. Don’t read, don’t think about something else. Notice the flavors, the textures, the smells. Enjoy the gift that you have been given. Take joy in what you’re eating. Savor every bite. Let your meal nourish your body and soul. And be grateful.
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