Soul food: why fasting makes sense

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Christian fasting was in a Russian kitchen in the provincial city of Krasnodar in 1991. It was November and my host, a university professor, was preparing the evening meal at the beginning of the Orthodox fast called Little Lent, which is a bit like what Catholics and Protestants call Advent. While we boiled and chopped beets, carrots and potatoes, she explained that we were making a fasting salad. She added pickles and parsley and tossed the salad in sunflower oil, salt and pepper before serving it with brown bread. Olga Nikolaevna observed a partial fast--no meat and no dairy products--for the four weeks of Little Lent, and she continued to fast in various ways throughout the year. Fasting, for her, was a small piece of her religious devotion,

I was struck by the simplicity and gentle discipline of her practice. But it was more than a decade before I began to consider the purpose of this kind of fast for myself. A lifelong Protestant--at various times attending Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches and eventually an Episcopal church--I associated fasting with rigid control of the body, with extreme forms of self-discipline, with a denial of the flesh that I could not quite understand. In a diet- and health-obsessed culture, it is difficult to present the practice of Christian fasting as something other than another way to subdue and discipline the body. The magazine racks and newspapers are full of diet and health advice, which changes with the vagaries of consumer fads. We live in a culture with an extreme focus on the flesh and its management. Finding alternative paradigms to talk about the body is not easy.

I have come to see a certain form of fasting, however, as an antidote to obsessive behavior involving the body. Fasting as a spiritual practice is not about improving your health. It is not about becoming thinner, stronger or more supple. It is not about learning to ignore your cravings or attaining perfection. It is not even about simply disciplining your body so that it is better behaved. In my view, fasting is about three things: attentiveness, compassion and freedom.

The first lesson is attentiveness, or mindfulness. Fasting is a tool in being present to the here and now. Several months ago, drawn by a sense that fasting could be an important teacher for me, I began a partial fasting practice, abstaining from meat and dairy products on Wednesdays and Fridays. Abstention on particular days helps to mark those days, to invite the nuances of the day more fully into our consciousness. Fasting at particular meals helps us to be attentive to that meal, to the food available and our responses to it. It helps us be attentive to our own bodies, our own desires and the demands of our own flesh.

This kind of fasting does not mean ignoring hunger pains or cravings but listening carefully to them, observing how they change over time, looking at the relationship of mind and body in the experience of hunger and in the experience of food. It offers a very gentle and careful "stop" on the fast-paced road of our culture, where we are told to abide by a specific but ever-changing set of rules and rarely encouraged to listen. Fasting helps us to observe ourselves a little more keenly and to understand more deeply how we engage the basic human experience called eating.

The second lesson is compassion. Fasting teaches us about connectedness. While preparing supper one Wednesday, I was suddenly entranced by the simplicity of the food before me, by the almost universal experience of eating carrots and potatoes. I felt that I understood in a more tangible way than I had before that I am one of 6 billion people on the planet, all of whom experience eating. Instead of asking whether low-fat or low-carb foods are better for me, I began to ask about how the food I eat affects the world around me. How can the simple, everyday task of eating become an act of compassion?

MONKS HAVE restricted meat and dairy products in part because bread and vegetables have always been the food of the poor--the simplest and least expensive food available. When we voluntarily agree to share this food, we become more tangibly connected to the poverty of millions who struggle to put food on their plates for today. Though I have known for some time that many people in the world are hungry and that my experience of plenitude is a privilege, the experience of fasting made this knowledge a more physical reality to me. I understood more fully Robert Farrar Capon's comment that we should not allow our abundance to deprive us of an understanding of hunger. Capon writes, "As long as the passion of the world goes on, we are called to share it as we can--especially if by the mere luck of the draw, we have escaped the worst pains of it." I felt that I had found a very small way of enacting this knowledge, of letting it live in me more completely.

From this perspective we can see that fasting is not about perfection but about learning a path of love. I mentioned my experiment to a small group at my church, and as I spoke I remembered that there were three women in the room who were recovering from anorexia. What I perceived as an exercise in spiritual freedom they could easily see as a path toward self-denial to the point of death. This experience too forced my heart open a little bit wider, silenced any self-congratulatory voice in me, and urged me onward. If fasting does not fulfill this purpose, then it is really of little use at all. In Isaiah we read, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house: when you see the naked to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?" (58:6-7). This passage seems to discourage fasting for its own sake or for the sake of piety. Fasting is useless unless it teaches compassion, unless it gives way to love.