Fasting, giving up food for a period of time in order to spend concentrated time with God, is difficult. This is why it is a spiritual discipline.

It causes suffering. Why would I give up something so obviously good and needful as food? Yet we know as Christians we are in pursuit of something more, and nothing makes you quite as hangry as fasting. But when I say hangry, I don’t just mean the psychosomatic phenomenon of being cranky because your blood sugar is low. There’s a deeper kind of agitated hunger that we uncover through fasting.

In Romans 12:2, Paul tells us

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God–what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Fasting is in its essence a physical practice, but the discipline part comes through the renewing of our minds. In Greek, the word for mind is nous. This is different from the psyche, which includes our thoughts, our emotions; literally our psychology. The nous is, more specifically, the way of thinking, our free will in regards to our thought life.

Growing ‘Trees’ of Life

There is a scientific principle behind this spiritual reality of the renewing of the mind (nous). Dr. Caroline Leaf is a Christian and cognitive neuroscientist. She, in her research, discovered that our thoughts create physical neural pathways in our brains. The habitual negative thoughts we have create ‘trees’ of neurons in our brains, and the good news is, we can break down those thoughts and create new ‘trees’ of life, according to God’s word! (For more information, check out this excellent presentation, or read her book, Switch On Your Brain!)

The process of this is slow and difficult. It is a discipline of the mind, and fasting creates a physical reminder in us to change our way of thinking. There is a reason why Catholics pray with a rosary: it is a tangible tool to help draw the body, along with the mind and the soul, into prayer and communion with God.

When I first began fasting regularly, while still in the US, I would begin to feel painful hunger pangs in the late morning, when my body knew that breakfast was overdue. Hangry. Though my body was craving, my mind knew that my spirit was craving even more. So I would remind myself, as often as I had to, “I’m more hungry for Jesus right now than I am for food.”

Eventually, through the mundane repetition of fasting once a week, a few months in, I no longer was hindered by morning hunger pangs. (This lines up with Dr. Leaf’s research, which says in order to create new, healthy thought-patterns, it takes at least 63 days.) When the pangs would return more strongly in the mid-afternoon, closer to twenty hours or so since I had last eaten, I would dive even deeper into communion with God.

When I pressed into the discomfort I was feeling in my body, it caused me to cling even more to Jesus. The pain of hunger in my body made me more aware of the deeper pain of other unfulfilled hungers: a hunger to be living and ministering in Ireland, a hunger to one day be married and have children, and deepest of all, a hunger to know God more. It’s as if the hungrier my body felt, the more I realized the hunger I had for God.

Theosis: Becoming Like God

When we use our free will to choose with the mind to submit ourselves to God, as a living sacrifice, we are slowly transformed into His image, just as Paul wrote about in Romans. Orthodox Christians have word for this: it’s called theosis, or the process of becoming like God.

At its basic level, fasting makes you master your emotions when the ‘hanger’ grabs a hold of you; you are master of your person, not your emotions, and not your hunger. What you are cultivating, through this renewing of the mind, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is self-control. (See Galatians 5:22-23, the fruit of the Spirit.) You’re cultivating self-control over the impulse to eat, and by extension, self-control over how you gratify, or don’t gratify, the desires of the flesh. (See previous post for more in-depth talk about the flesh.)

Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. –Galatians 5:24-25 NRSV

The passions of the flesh are ultimately a selfish desire for pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Through fasting, hunger for God grows in your spirit, and the worldly passions begin to slowly lose their hold on you. In the Orthodox tradition, this state is called apatheia, which means literally, freedom from the passions (pathos) of the flesh. Rather than a dull and uninspiring life, a life of apatheia is a life of ever-increasing freedom and satisfaction in Christ. Sin stops tasting so good when you’ve tasted the goodness of God.

For me personally, fasting transformed me totally as a person at every level, from small victories over sugar cravings to coming to the realization that should God decide that I will never marry, I know I will always be deeply satisfied in Christ. After all, we’re not made to live forever in this world. Fasting should remind us that though we are hungry and in pain now, there is coming a day that we will be satisfied and whole, resurrected with Christ, in eternal, intimate fellowship in heaven. There is a divine Wedding Feast still ahead of us, and the more we grasp that, the lighter the troubles of this world seem.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. Romans 8:18

(This is Part Two of a series on fasting. Part One is here, and Part Three is here.)