Not a Fast-Track to Holiness

Through fasting, prayer and acts of service

you bring us back to your generous heart.  

Well, prayer yes, acts of service certainly, but how exactly is fasting supposed to help us appreciate God’s generosity?  Yes, it’s a time when we remember Jesus fasting in the wilderness, but we don’t commemorate Jesus’s death by hanging ourselves on Good Friday.  If it comes to that, why did Jesus fast for forty days, and is this really a good example to imitate?

Many people decide to give up something – such as chocolate, social media or alcohol – for Lent, though as this article points out, people claiming on Twitter to be giving up Twitter probably aren’t being exactly serious.

In past centuries, Christians used to practise more severe self-denial in Lent, giving up meat, eggs and dairy (hence the tradition of eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday to use up leftover milk, eggs and lard).  Admittedly, this was only partly because of religious reasons and partly because, when last year’s supplies of food were running out, Lent was likely to be a lean time anyway. 

Today, when intensive farming and global transport of food makes it easy to eat what we want whenever we want, climate scientists keep warning us that the methane produced by huge numbers of cows is a major cause of global warming and that we need to move to a lower-meat diet.  So this could be a more contemporary reason for going vegetarian or vegan for Lent.  Either way, it suggests that the character in this cartoon is in a longer tradition than he knows:

But – actually not eating?  Not for the whole of Lent, but maybe missing one meal per week, or even not eating for one day per week?  Is there any reason for doing that?

Well, there can be practical reasons.  Most of us have the instinct to eat slightly more than we need when food is plentiful, in case we don’t find food tomorrow.  So if you’re overweight, or just trying to stay a healthy weight, then giving your digestive system the odd break might help.  Alternatively, if it just encourages you to binge-eat the next day, it might not.

If you are underweight or close to underweight, then please, please don’t eat any less.  This BMI calculator should tell you if you are underweight, overweight, or within the healthy range (usually 20-25).  However, bear in mind that if you are particularly broad-shouldered, big-boned or muscular, or if you suffer from curvature of the spine, you might be classified by the BMI chart as a healthy weight, or even overweight, while carrying insufficient body-fat.  At the point when he died, my father-in-law had a BMI of 30 and was underweight.

For everyone else, though, let’s go back to the subject of fasting.  Experiencing hunger can give us some inkling of what it is like for people who frequently don’t have enough to eat – and we can donate the money we haven’t spent on food that day to people who need it more. 

The Live Below the Line challenge invites people to try living on only £1 worth of food per day (and if you want to take up this challenge during Lent, please do, and if you email me and tell me, I’ll be happy to sponsor you).  PDB11 and I have tried doing that in the past, but found that, in practice, this meant buying the cheapest food, which wasn’t the most ethically produced (for example, factory-farmed bacon is cheaper than either free-range meat or vegetarian options).  So it is probably better to shop as ethically as we can for what we do eat, but, occasionally, simply to eat less.

These are practical reasons.  However, fasting for religious reasons is usually seen as a spiritual discipline.  So what is the reasoning behind this?

Firstly, let’s look at some of the things fasting isn’t.  It isn’t a hunger-strike to pressurise God into doing what we want, such as, ‘I’ll refuse to eat until you bring an end to coronavirus/make Vladimir Putin stop attacking Ukraine/make the nations of the world commit to tackling climate change.’  Either God cares about us or he doesn’t.  If he does, then he listens to our prayers anyway, without needing to be blackmailed; and if he is indifferent to humans, blackmail won’t make any difference.

So, if fasting isn’t an attempt to steer God’s will, maybe it is better to see it as a way of training ourselves to be better at doing God’s will.  But better in what way?  One essay I read assumed that it is simply a matter of learning self-control: that if we can overcome even our basic physical instinct to eat, we can control ourselves in all respects.

The trouble is that this doesn’t work.  At the most obvious level, millions of people suffer from anorexia: in other words, they have worked so hard at training themselves not to eat that they can’t control the urge to refuse to eat.

From my own experience, I know that I am more emotionally volatile, and more prone to become paranoid and irrational, when I am tired or hungry.  Many therapists and support groups – particularly for people recovering from addictions, but it applies more generally – teach the acronym HALT: relapses of whatever kind (emotional breakdown, returning to using drugs or alcohol, or whatever someone’s problem is) are more likely to occur when we are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired.

A few years ago, I decided to fast on Maundy Thursday and on the afternoon of Easter Saturday (I was working in a care home 10am – 2pm on Friday and Saturday, so would need to eat something on those days to keep my strength up), and spend this time reading the Bible and praying.  The result was that I went so paranoid that I convinced myself that God had already written humans off as irredeemably evil by the time of Noah, and therefore that the idea that Jesus had atoned for us must be just a cruel hoax.  Both on Maundy Thursday evening, and on the morning of Easter Sunday, I ran out of church crying.

Also, for biblical fundamentalists, the idea that fasting is a fail-safe path to purity and immunity from temptation is undermined by the Bible itself.  In the Bible’s description of Jesus’s experience in the wilderness, Jesus is particularly vulnerable to temptation because he is weak with hunger.

So perhaps fasting is not something we do to make ourselves purer, as if distancing ourselves from our bodies’ needs makes us more spiritual, but an exercise in faith.  Perhaps it is a way of saying, ‘God, I know that I am weak.  Lately, I’ve been managing to stay calm as long as I’m not under any kind of stress.  But if, just today, I decide to miss a meal – or all today’s meals – and dedicate the time I would normally spend in cooking and eating and washing up to praying and worshipping instead, will you help me get through it without having a meltdown?’

We might find that the answer is: no, we’re not yet ready to cope with any additional strain.  And if not, we might find healthier ways of coping – okay, I’ve fasted for part of the day, so that’s a start; now it’s time to have a piece of toast, cuddle someone I love, and read something relaxing until I’ve calmed down – rather than grimly struggling on with the fast and giving in to despair, the way I did a few years back.

So far, I’ve tried it once this Lent and survived.  I’ll try it again, and see what happens.  But not too soon.

PDB11 now has his own blog, Theological Engineer.  Have a look at it!