Fasting
An exploration of the spiritual discipline and practice of fasting in Christian tradition, examining its biblical foundations and modern applications.
Those who fasted in response to grievous sacred moments frequently—but not always!—received results, like answered prayer. But focusing on the results causes us to misunderstand fasting entirely.
fasting is what happens to the unified person who encounters a moment so sacred—a death, a consciousness of sin, a need to stand before God in prayer, a desire for holiness and love—that the person simply can’t eat— the moment is too sacred to indulge in food or pleasure. Our bodies need foods and fuels to survive; it is our responsibility to recognize this. We are to live before God, ourselves, and others in a way that knows the difference between the sacredness of eating and the sacredness of fasting.
The foundational sacred moment for body discipline is consciousness of sin, consciousness of weakness, the need for God’s empowering grace, the desire to cut back in life in order to find our center, and a yearning to grow morally in love and holiness.
At the very core of fasting is empathy with the divine or participation in God’s perception of a sacred moment. When someone dies, God is grieved; when someone sins, particularly egregiously, God is grieved; when a nation is threatened, God is grieved. We could provide more examples. The point is this: fasting identifies with God’s perspective and grief in a sacred moment. Fasting enables us to identify with how God views a given event; fasting empowers us to empathize with God. Fasting is about pathos, taking on the emotions of God in a given event.
The rule to follow is a simple one: fasting, like all the spiritual disciplines, is designed to develop love of God and love of others. If it is not doing that, something is wrong.
the Bible shows almost no interest in fasting as a means to conquer the monster—that is, as a means for the spirit to overcome the passions or the soul to outlast the flesh in fight-till-you-die battle. For many, fasting is about the battle against the body.
“Fasting helps us to express, to deepen, and to confirm the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, even ourselves, to attain the Kingdom of God.”
It is not uncommon for a fast motivated by a yearning for kingdom justice to be simultaneously motivated by grief over the absence of justice, peace, and love in this world in the here and now.
This kind of discipline, like all the other kinds of fasting described in this volume, brings to expression an overall yearning to be more holy, to be more loving, and to be more responsive to God, self, others, and the entire world. Instead of marking down an urgent need and an immediate answer and fasting intensely for answers to those needs, body discipline engages the whole life in order to effect moral and spiritual development in one’s sacred journey. Progress is measured in decades, not days.
Fasting along with our prayer requests is not some kind of magic bullet to ensure the answer we want. Fasting doesn’t reinforce the crumbling walls of our prayers like a flying buttress, nor is it a manipulative device. We fast because a condition arises—what we are calling the sacred moment—that leads us to desire something deeply. We fast because our plea is so intense that in the midst of our sacred desire eating seems sacrilegious.
movement. Fasting is a response to a sacred moment, not an instrument designed to get desired results.
we will fast because we will sense God’s response to the very conditions around us, and it will lead us to join in the good work of God. I suspect that we will discover that joining God is all we really wanted anyway.
When people tell us they are fasting, we should ask, “In response to what?” instead of, “What do you hope you will get out of it?”
One of the most widely read fasting books is Arthur Wallis’s God’s Chosen Fast. He states our point so well: “We do not need to extinguish the fire in the grate; only to prevent the coals from falling out and setting the place on fire.”10 The healthy side of the early Christian development was the moderate disciplinary fast designed to keep the coals of desire—mostly sexual, but also gluttonous—from falling out and setting the entire Christian on fire.