I stood frozen within the cereal aisle. On either side of me were 1000’s of boxes and bags of breakfast grains stretched out row after row, in scores of sorts: Vitamin fortified! Extra marshmallows! Cinnamon clusters with organic wheat germ for twice your day by day fiber!
For the past 4 and a half years, I’d been living in a foreign country, limited to the road of local food vendors near my house. I’d walk up and down the market past wriggling eels in gallon buckets, steaming dumplings from slightly chrome cart, and gritty bundles of bok choy heaped on a card table. I’d buy only what I could slot in my bags and carry back home on foot. Now, just after moving back to America, I used to be paralyzed by the surplus surrounding me at my local food market.
A land of plenty is an odd place to fast from food. And not simply because lots of us haven’t known of fasting by necessity, but in addition due to our underlying cultural assumptions.
On one hand, we embrace the indulgence of hedonism—what the body wants, it should have. We enthrone desire as the very best good, give in to each craving, and let it enslave us. And as a rule, our pleasures are designed for excess. Just as streaming corporations encourage binging and smartphones aim for addiction, loads of what we eat is scientifically engineered to addict us. It’s hard to rightly order our appetites once they have been manipulated by global food conglomerates that benefit from excess.
On the opposite hand, we embrace a modern-day iteration of Gnosticism. Strongly influenced by Platonic and dualist philosophies, we split the physical from the spiritual in a false dichotomy. We elevate the supernatural realm as purer and truer than the corporeal—which we regularly regard as dirty and even sinful. We eating regimen to excess—patterned after social influencers. For many, the prospect of fasting carries with it the bags of shame and non secular pride, and it may well trigger those scuffling with disordered eating.
It can be one thing if these lies were only promoted by our culture, but sadly they may show up in our churches.
A culture of materialism or hedonism in church can look, for instance, like a relentless pursuit of upper attendance and an even bigger budget to purchase nicer facilities. I remember one missionary friend walking into my megachurch auditorium and growing offended. Surveying our gleaming screens, padded seats, and luscious flower arrangements, he said, “The church we planted had to lift money for folding chairs. We’ve met in a basement for 20 years. What does all this tell people concerning the cross of Christ?”
There can be a myriad of how the church implies, sometimes by chance, that our flesh is an issue and that our spirits are the actual deal. This might entail judging members who take anti-depressants for his or her lack of religion—or an elder board that won’t fund a mission to dig wells overseas unless they’re assured the gospel can be presented at the identical time. Churchy Gnosticism makes bodies problematic, or on the very least inferior to whatever we mean by souls.
These two opposing lies—which lead us to either exalt or neglect our bodies—profoundly inform our habits around food. And for Christians, the spiritual discipline of fasting offers a robust third way, and it speaks truth against our favourite lies about our bodies.
Ever since stumbling in, and out, of Anglicanism years ago, I’ve given up some creative things for Lent: scrolling Instagram, church gatherings, using my phone after 5 p.m., and even one 12 months, adding unnecessary comments to conversations. Ever the individualists, we wish to invent bespoke abstentions. And although there’s little question these can serve useful purposes in our lives with God, I keep returning to fasting from food within the context of community due to the way in which it targets our cultural lies.
Food fasting has been considered a conventional Christian habit throughout time and world wide. On John Mark Comer’s podcast, one Ethiopian guest described how she grew up fasting together with her Christian community from sunup to sundown for 50 days. Another guest joyfully described the keen awareness of the Spirit he normally gets on the 14th day of a quick.
That sounds so cool, but I’m not there yet. When it involves food fasting, I’m still a beginner—still determining learn how to prayerfully skip three meals with any type of regularity. And as I’m attempting to put it into practice, I’m also seeking to learn from others concerning the spiritual purpose of the habit.
Nineteenth-century missionary Hudson Taylor learned much about fasting from the Shansi Chinese believers. “Since it makes one feel weak and poorly,” Taylor observed, fasting “is basically a Divinely appointed technique of grace. Perhaps the best hindrance to our work is our own imagined strength. In fasting we learn what poor, weak creatures we’re, depending on a meal of meat for the little strength which we’re so apt to lean upon.” It seems God likes to fill the weakness fasting reveals in us.
I’m also discovering that self-denial in our eating can develop our muscles for heavenly battle. As Robert Moll says, the “habit of denial strengthens our ability to take up the cross as even our very bodies are molded into the likeness of Christ.” I’ve noticed that once I’m fasting, I’m capable of resist my pet temptations more robustly. It jogs my memory of being back in college once I’d lift leg weights within the gym in order that I could run faster and kick harder on the soccer field.
Even Jesus experienced physical abstinence as a solution to spiritual strength. After the Spirit led him to fast for 40 days, bathing in his Father’s affirmation, Jesus was ready to fulfill the Devil within the desert.
Food fasting may make us aware of our poor eating habits as a society. Many of us scarf dinner alone in front of a show or grab fast food between one thing and the subsequent in our busy schedules. We overindulge and we throw out loads. For what I even have eaten, and left uneaten, I feel truly sorry.
After all, what does it matter if I swear off excess only to go away a brother or sister in need empty? What wouldn’t it appear like to fast not just for the fitting ordering of my body and spirit with God but for the just practices of my neighborhood?
Our gluttony and our unhealthy self-deprivations each occur in an age of real hunger. One in 8 Americans experience food insecurity—in other words, they don’t find the money for to eat as much as they need. The variety of hungry humans that surround overstuffed food stores grieves me. In the world’s wealthiest country, some people still starve.
Many believers have used Lent or other fasts to align themselves with the hungry—to lift awareness or money for the poor, and to recollect to wish for those in need. Some friends of mine spent one Lent eating nothing but rice and beans in solidarity with those that don’t have any other options. Every time we feel our stomachs grumble, our hunger can function a Post-it note reminding us to wish for those in need.
Communal, poverty-aligned fasting can move us beyond our egocentric view—seeing it as a person spiritual practice—and open our eyes to the experiences of all those outside our bubble. Far from indicting it as performative, the prophet Isaiah praises the type of fast wherein we “free those that are wrongly imprisoned … share [our] food with the hungry and provides shelter to the homeless” (Is. 58:6–7).
As far as my personal experience of fasting, it varies wildly. I never know the way holy hunger goes to affect me. Sometimes my body appears like a transparent vessel overflowing with the Holy Spirit. I can feel God’s love for his world pulsing out in all directions; I get clarity and breakthroughs, and my prayers appear to “availeth much” (James 5:16, KJV). Other times once I fast, I just get cranky—I obsess over the food I’m missing, get a headache, and feel like all the pieces is silly.
But whether I feel the spiritual significance or not doesn’t change the worth of the fast. It’s certainly one of those disciplines by which, as Richard Foster points out in his classic book Celebration of Discipline, we carve out a dedicated space (the body) and a dedicated time (say, Wednesdays from 6 a.m. to six p.m.) for God, into which he’s welcome to enter. While my motives for fasting matter, I don’t should get all my sanctification geese in a row to do it.
My fasts are everywhere, lopsided in motivation, sometimes—ahem—shorter than intended, and never that spectacular. When I offer my body to God with fasting, it’s a messy gift, as if a toddler grabbed some crayons, scribbled an image, and thrust it into her dad’s hands. Fasting says, Here! Here are my addictions and dependencies, my pleasures and cravings, my weakness, and what little strength I even have. Do you wish it? And he does!
With our fasting, God undertakes to free us from the cruelty of asceticism and the paralysis of indulgence. Fasting attacks each my inner hedonist and my inner dualist, who snobbishly dismiss the fabric world as less necessary than the spiritual realm. As we provide our bodies as living sacrifices, God does what neither hedonism nor Gnosticism can do: He values our bodies and our bodily self-control. And he calls our physical sacrifice holy.
Fasting each renews our awareness of our bodies’ spiritual significance and honors our bodies as lovingly crafted, lavishly supplied, sacred spaces to rendezvous with God.
God doesn’t see our bodies as secondary or irrelevant. From the moment God mixes dust with divine breath to form Adam, the Bible presents humans as integrated, holistic selves. Jesus got here because the Word made flesh. He fed empty stomachs and he preached sermons. He healed physical sickness and he forgave sins. The Messiah treated every a part of his fellow human beings as significant.
Likewise, God intends for our bodies and spirits to be inextricably braided together. Fasting rejoins our spirits and our bodies, the pneuma and the soma. With a quick, we put God back in command of our desires and ask him to be higher than whatever we’re craving. We humbly ask that his kingdom reign in our bodies.
Graciously, he also reveals the communal nature of our attitudes and actions around eating, and he invites us to “act justly” (Mic. 6:8) in the case of food. God cherishes human bodies, all made in his image. They are a part of his kingdom plan. He cares about our food: what we do and don’t eat, and why, and with whom. He cares about our bellies and our grief—each the meal and the hungry man on the sidewalk. Not only that, but his promise of redemption will in the future transform all of it.
To one newly repatriated American, overwhelmed within the cereal aisle, all that is excellent news—that’s the gospel.
Jeannie Whitlock is a contract journalist and poet within the Chicago suburbs who writes about holy embodiment in all its diverse ramifications.
