“Fasting is the body’s way of praying: you voluntarily empty yourself and make yourself miserable so that God may have mercy, as if your belly itself were crying” “See how empty I am! I have no strength and no helper! O you who are merciful, see how deep is my need and have mercy on me!” (Phillip Cary, Jonah: Brazos Theological Commentary, p. 111)
Lent is often associated with “giving something up." Usually it's something we tend to indulge too much of, like alcohol, or chocolate. This year many are questioning this approach.
A friend of mine suffers from a severe gastronomical condition that prohibits her from eating most foods, and so every year, Lent just seems silly. Give up chocolate? She hasn’t eaten chocolate in years. I always think of her and others in a similar situation around Lent, and wonder, is our take on fasting really just a means to self-improvement? In Silicon Valley, fasting is all the rage.
Our Eastern Orthodox sisters and brothers point out that, traditionally, Lent meant giving up staples like yeast and sugar. In the gospels Jesus gave up food for 40 days (putting Jack Dorsey to shame—he’s Twitter's CEO and only drinks lemon juice on weekends). I’m all for self-care, but fasting has nothing to do with it. So, what is it?
Fasting and the Body: Prayer
The quote above from Phillip Cary above tells us what fasting is: a prayer the body prays. Humans are fundamentally empty and in need of God. But as Flannery O’Connor wrote in her prayer journal when she was a twenty, “God is feeding me and what I’m praying for is an appetite.” We don’t always feel our hunger for God, perhaps because we’ve filled up on idols. Fasting at its most basic puts us in touch with that hunger for God that is always there. It restores our appetite for God.
The idea of our bodies leading the way seems ridiculous to the modern, western self, where we think that thought is all that matters. We think of our bodies as meat-suits we are trapped inside for a short time. But a whole person is inseparable from the body, and the body can teach us a great deal.
Barbara Holmes studies contemplative practices in the black church. In many of these practices, the body is central. She points to the visceral groaning of African captives on slave ships as a form of prayerful lament. No words, just the body’s moan, a “groaning too deep for words” (Romans 8). It may be that our body is praying now in ways we are not aware of, and we need to sit still long enough to hear the prayer our body is praying. Maybe the fast to which we are called is silence, a fast from words. This is one dimension of fasting.
Fasting and Food: Waiting
A second dimension of fasting is still connected to our bodies, but has more to do with food and waiting.
Fasting is literally a form of waiting. No one fasts forever. The connection between waiting and food is depicted in Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. In response to a group of people who ate all the food at Communion, refusing to wait for others, he says they miss the point of the feast. They were just feeding, like animals, something they could have done at home. Feeding is what all creatures do. Feeding turns into feasting when there is momentary fasting—waiting for everyone to have enough, and eating together.
Waiting/fasting extends, if we let it, beyond our table and the people around us. Just as food connects us with those we share it with, it also connects us with the people who raised it, and the places it came from. Until recently, waiting was part of that connection. For most of human history, and in other cultures today, humans are required to wait until the right season for most food. Fresh peaches only in late summer. Asparagus in the spring. Pork and beans through the winter. We don’t have to do this anymore, but there are a lot of reasons to continue this kind of waiting—it takes a lot more fuel to get a tomato from Mexico in the winter than from Laporte in July. Here again, fasting leads to feasting—the peach from Hotchkiss in late August is glorious.
Third, fasting as waiting leads to feasting with God. Before our meals we often say a blessing, or give thanks. It’s not because it’s obligatory—if you don’t say thanks, God won’t get mad and poison you! It’s because it’s a wonderful way to remember that whenever we feast, we feast with God, because as Creator and Sustainer of life, God is at the head of every table bestowing gifts on us all. Saying thanks is a way of waiting for God, too.
Conclusion: The Fast of God
Fasting as waiting takes us finally to the good news at the heart of the practice. It’s not that we become worth something to God through self-denial, but that we get in touch with the heart of God, for the heart of God is what the Old Testament calls long suffering, or patient—waiting for all to come to repentance.
Robert Jenson, one the great theologians of our time, was asked by his granddaughter Solveig why Jesus hadn’t yet come back to rid the world of evil and establish his kingdom completely. Jenson replied to his granddaughter, because God has been waiting. Waiting for who? she asked. He answered, God was waiting for Solveig. The fast of God is to wait to eat the Great Feast until all have joined him at the table.