Tag: fasting

True Fasting: An Apologia

February 26th, 2023

I have had a handful of conversations about fasting lately, coincidentally falling around the time of Lent. If you know me very well, you’ll know that this is a topic I love discussing, because of how much it transformed my life. For the last five years, fasting has also been the focus of my academic research, and I am always thinking about it.

The point of contention I always encounter with people in conversations is the issue of fasting from social media. I would like to make an apologia (defense) of fasting as strictly a physical sacrifice of food, meaning that abstaining from social media, as beneficial as this is and can be, is not true fasting. First, we will look at how fasting was historically practiced, especially in the Christian tradition. Then, we will see how in Isaiah 58, the prophet condemns the religious hypocrisy he saw in Judah at the time. Finally, we will see why the physical sacrifice of food is so central to this practice.

What is true fasting?

Practically, fasting has been practiced by both Jews and Christians for at least around two thousand years. In Jesus’ day, Jews observed two fast days per week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Later on, Christians adopted this practice, but changed their fast days to Wednesdays and Fridays. There were also certain days in the liturgical calendar during which Jews were commanded to fast (like on Purim eve, or Yom Kippur, among other days). Lent is, of course, another season marked by fasting or abstention. Typically when Christians do fast, they will spend time in the Word and in prayer when they would normally be eating.

Jesus’ Instructions for Christian Piety

In Matthew 6, Jesus gives us instructions for living a pious, or devoted life, saying, “When you pray…” When you give alms…” and “When you fast…” He contrasts the self-focused, performative ways in which people were doing these things with the better way to practice: without thought for what we gain, or how we are perceived. In modern day Evangelical practice, we tend to pray in our “prayer closets” and to give without being recognized for our generosity, although we likely wouldn’t observe fasting, regularly or otherwise.

In Eastern Orthodox tradition, which is incredibly strict around fasting, they follow Jesus’ instructions in Matthew 6 as a unified triad. They are told that on their regular fast days, whatever money they save on food should be given to the poor instead. It is a literal and direct observance of these instructions we have from Jesus, and almost surprising in its outward, community focus. We tend to think of fasting as an individual and private thing, not least of all because Jesus tells us not to broadcast that we are fasting. But our fasting is pointless if it does not in some way help me love my neighbor better, and benefit someone else other than myself.

Hypocritical Fasting

Beyond weekly fasting, in the Old Testament, sometimes it was used as a way to try and get God’s attention, to ask Him for mercy in suffering. Hannah does this in 1 Samuel 1 when she is desperate for a child, and God gives her a son in Samuel, the first prophet of Israel. David also does this in 2 Samuel 12, in an attempt to save his son’s life after conceiving illegitimately with Bathsheba. His plea is not answered in this instance. This kind of fasting is what is happening in Isaiah 58, in which God answers back to why their pleading fasts are unsuccessful. At the beginning of this chapter, God quotes the people of Judah:

“‘Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?’” (58:3a).

God responds by saying,

“Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and suppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. …Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” (vv. 3-4, 5b)

Following this, God corrects them by telling them they should pursue justice and to fight for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized:

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (vv. 6-7)

The setting of this chapter takes place around the end of the 8th century or early 7th century BCE, after the nation of Israel has split in two: Israel in the north (who had already fallen to the Assyrians), and Judah in the south. Isaiah is in the Judean capital of Jerusalem, speaking to the nation of the imminent threat of invasion and destruction on the horizon. He warns them that if they do not return to God, their city will be destroyed. Of course we do know that Jerusalem did eventually fall, to the Babylonians, less than 150 years afterward, and the people of God were sent into exile.

In a manner not much different from today, the poor were being extorted and exploited in order to benefit a very few rich at the top. This is what the prophets time and again condemned, for we know this is not what God commanded for His people. He hates religious hypocrisy and performative piety. In continuation with the Old Testament prophetic tradition, just as in Matthew 6, we also see this in the words of Jesus in Matthew 9:13, where he quotes from Hosea: “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice; the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hos. 6:9)

Social Media “Fasting”

Having done a brief overview of how fasting was practiced historically by both Jews and Christians on a regular basis; how improper fasting was condemned in the Old Testament; and how different Christian traditions practice fasting still today, where do we place abstention from social media?

A simple reductio ad absurdum will make the matter clear: Jesus did not have a Facebook to delete from his phone; Moses did not have Instagram to abstain from; and Paul certainly did not spend his evenings scrolling on Twitter or TikTok. I use social media daily, and I am not calling it evil. Nor am I saying that abstaining from social media for a time is hypocritical, pointless, or self-serving. While there is much benefit in decreasing our time scrolling mindlessly, I maintain it is a shortsighted way to cultivate one of those time-honored spiritual disciplines, like prayer, fasting, scripture reading, and simply sitting still in God’s presence.

As we have seen in both the Old Testament and the New, true fasting must be sacrificial, and involve abstention from food. This sacrifice is just as legitimate whether it is as small as giving up chocolate or meat, or doing a full, water-only fast for a time. The cravings or hunger of the body must be a reminder to us throughout our fast of the sacrifice we have chosen to make, and why we have chosen to do so–and that is so that we see God’s will be done and his Kingdom come!

We are called to imitate Christ in his self-sacrificial love for us, and fasting can become a highly effective way to live out a cruciform life. Through this we willingly enter into the suffering of Christ, even on some small level, for its power to transform us more and more into His image. Therefore, while abstaining from social media is a useful auxiliary to our cultivation of spiritual disciplines, we cannot call it fasting. Be encouraged, this is a doable practice that can yield much fruit, even with the smallest of sacrifices.
Seeking Shalom Part II: Fasting & Flourishing

September 19th, 2022

When I was still living in Dublin I spent the last three years living in an area formerly known as Little Jerusalem, due to the once-thriving Jewish community who lived in the neighborhood. There are some rare Hebrew-origin streets names there which hint at this. I lived on a street called Reuben Avenue, and a stone’s throw away from my house was a Place called Rehoboth, which comes from Genesis 26:22, wherein Isaac finally finds a place to settle with his flocks and his family. Rehoboth essentially means “wide open spaces,” like that 90’s song from The Chicks!

He moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he called it Rehoboth, saying, “Now the Lord has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.” Gen. 26:22

On the end of Rehoboth Place, there stands an enormous house that looks like it was built to be a multi-family dwelling. Rather, it was for one family in the 18th century who had twenty four (!!) children. They chose a place to live, then outside the city walls, where there were some good spring-fed wells, and they could have enough space for all their children; thus the name, and the large building.

Both this Irish family, and the family of Isaac, had to find a defined and definite place to settle down, in order to flourish. What is the connection between my exploration of weakness through fasting, and flourishing? I believe that it is to be found along our boundary lines.

Boundary Lines

A year ago I wrote about fasting and I made a claim that it should generate compassion through a recognition of our own weaknesses. “What fasting does is simultaneously heighten the threshold for personal suffering, and deepen a sense of compassion because of that suffering.” I have recently realized that I never backed up that claim, which is unscientific of me. Today I want to explore this claim a little bit, drawing from pastoral metaphors of boundary lines and wide open spaces.

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage. Ps. 16:5-6

As we know from the first chapters of Genesis, each of us is like a cracked mirror–broken, weakened, flawed. Each of us has a lack, in one form or another. We each carry spiritual and therefore physical impoverishment, and to deny this about ourselves and the world would actually be an expression of that fallen state. Our brokenness should lead us back to God, without whom we cannot flourish. However, we are also finite beings, with other, normal–or even healthy–weaknesses, which delineate who we are and our abilities.

One of my now-favorite bible scholars I actually came across during the first lockdown while I was unemployed, and I reached out to him mid-2020 to thank him for how much his research had re-energized me as a scholar. (Ultimately our conversations and his guidance is what in fact led me to Germany this summer!) In my first email, I mentioned I was interested in researching fasting in the Hebrew Bible, and he responded that the isolation and low activity of the pandemic felt like a kind of fasting to him.

Although it was not technically fasting per se, many of us had the time to step away from our normal lives and to deeply examine our souls, to remind ourselves of what we truly value. We also faced our greatest fears around mortality and health, financial instability, and isolation. It was a painful denial of the goodness of social interaction for the greater good of others’ physical health and safety, as well as our own. It was a kind of vow of poverty which we all had to take.

Hangriness & Bad Habits

In one of my first posts about fasting, back in 2018, I talk about how fasting makes us hangry, in more ways than one: “There’s a deeper kind of agitated hunger that we uncover through fasting.” In my initial days cultivating this discipline, I used the physical hunger pangs I was feeling to redirect my mind toward my goal of uninterrupted time with Jesus, solely focused on Him and His Word. I became more able to tolerate the alarm signals in my body, and to train my being to understand that while I would be breaking my fast that evening, there was a greater good I was in pursuit of. This resulted, eventually, in control over my constant sugar cravings, among other transformations.

Initially I just saw this as a wonderful ascetic practice that was intended to bring about greater self-discipline and therefore Christlikeness. However, when I first began fasting, it was late 2016 and I had, for the second time, moved back from Dublin to live with my parents. I was 26 years old, living in a town where I had no friends, and the place just made me feel trapped, lifeless, and at times, hopeless that I would ever find my way back to Dublin to live there more permanently. So it makes sense that a sugar buzz temporarily dampened the depressed feeling I was living with. However, some of that hopelessness also stemmed from my fear that God would forget about me, and that He would not provide for me to return to Ireland. A spiritual wound, a sin-flaw, not to trust fully in God, and to take my own emotions as the truth.

Central here is that we often, or always, fail to see that “bad habits” are always somehow connected, especially our bodily habits, to deeper pain. If we don’t acknowledge the root cause, our spiritual impoverishment, then we will never be rid of the symptomatic bad habits that either niggle at or hound us daily. God wants deeper and deeper healing for us, but we have to have the bravery to choose it.

Boundary Lines

Let us return to the classic pastoral metaphor that I began with in Psalms. Each of us is allotted a wide open space, a pleasant and fertile land which is our lives, and it is our God-given responsibility, like Adam, or Isaac, to cultivate, nurture, and protect that land. If I am the landlady of my own life, and my silly sheep keep escaping through a broken fence in their pen, I must do the hard work of rebuilding that fence, ultimately to protect my livelihood. Then when the foxes come prowling around my perimeter at night, my sheep will no longer keep becoming someone else’s dinner.

How does this generate compassion, then, as I am claiming? Perhaps I know a younger or more inexperienced landowner who has broken fences that need mending, and they think buying border collie puppies will solve the problem, but it just doesn’t work. I could show my neighbor instead how to repair their fence. Or maybe I own a portion of forested land, and I can share timber for fencing, because my neighbor is poorer than I, and they are in need of wood. Awareness of our flaws should make us more compassionate toward the flaws we see in others, rather than antagonistic and full of blame and anger. I am no better than anyone else.

Put plainly, the goal of asceticism is to bear the fruit of righteousness, but that righteousness is not only of value in and of itself; it must be of benefit to others. This means mending fences, shoring up our weak places, and learning to flourish within our rehoboth.

Dwelling in Rehoboth

A further example from my time in Dublin: I initially thought that I loved youth ministry, but after seeing how exhausted and sick I became after one week of youth camp (two summers in a row!) once I returned to Dublin for my master’s, I stepped away from youth ministry to focus on young adult ministry, and especially, my studies. This is another kind of human weakness–a weakness at our limits, which actually indicates where our strength is. It makes sense that I would be plagued by awful sinus infection for a week or more after Pulse camp, because my body was constantly in fight-or-flight mode from overstimulation, lack of sleep, and physically pushing myself.

Our limits delineate who we are, which is why it is so important to know and fight for our boundaries. I am not responsible for guarding someone else’s cabbage patch; or if I try to pull slugs off someone’s tomatoes all day, then the rabbits will nibble away all my radishes, and my overgrown zucchini will choke out the onions, and all my ripe plums will fall to the ground, wasted.

How are my physical and mental limits also tied to my flawed sin nature? I can see now that my adrenaline-fueled time in youth ministry was actually driven by a wrong idea that I had to change my personality in order to fit in (and avoid rejection) as well as a sense of obligation to “perform” like a good missionary. That stemmed from my own previous wounds, insecurities, and dysfunctional ways of viewing the world. I didn’t respect my own limits, which is a sure path to burnout and spiritual barrenness. Once I started to respect those limits while doing my master’s, then I began to produce fruit that has led me to begin dreaming of a career as an academic and scholar.

Self-Compassion is Compassion

The cultivated pain and discipline of fasting (focused time in prayer and Bible-reading) clears our vision and gives perspective into our souls, illuminating the places where we need His healing. The time we spend reading the Bible, rather than eating, nourishes us with divine wisdom to then understand the shortcoming of others, and more broadly, the systemic dysfunction in our world. To willingly create a limit (i.e., I will fast once a week) can be perceived as weakness in a productivity-driven society. But it is within those boundary lines, on our fertile inner fields, that we can begin to flourish. That is God’s gift to us!

My responsibility–indeed, my calling– is to give that gift back to Him, through loving my neighbor as myself. If I am flourishing, then I can better serve others and find ways to help them flourish uniquely. I want to give out of a plentiful harvest. This includes the joyful responsibility of respecting my own limits and cherishing my unique strengths, but also the continued task of healing and ever-increasing in Christlike character and love. This, friends, is how we stay in pursuit of the shalom of the Kingdom, bringing heaven down to earth.
Seeking Shalom: Fasting, Weakness, and Generosity

September 29th, 2021

Introduction

For JW, with gratitude.

In my earlier posts on this blog, I have written about fasting as an ascetic practice, or a discipline. Much of my work on this, especially from the view of theology, was on the benefits that it offers us, improving our self-control, increasing our capacity for joy in the midst of suffering, and overall, helping us to flourish individually.

I believe that was short-sighted, and did not encompass the fullness of the message of the Bible, and in fact, I nearly missed it. Indeed, I believe I was instead informed more by a self-help approach, or what Baylor theologian and ethicist Matthew Lee Anderson would call a therapeutic approach to the practice. (You can read more of his thinking here on painkillers and caffeine, and or in his 2011 book Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith, which really shaped my thinking on this topic.) The last year or so has helped me to not only deepen my research on fasting, but also to broaden my perspective personally and theologically. The following will be a small sliver of what I have been thinking about lately.

First, I want to define the word shalom for us, or perhaps redefine it. Secondly, I will look at the role of humility and weakness in the fasting we see in the OT. Finally, I will connect those two ideas to show how fasting should generate compassion, and why this is so important.

Peace or Mutual Flourishing?

Shalom is broadly and most commonly defined as “peace,” but linguistically, and therefore theologically, it is much more than that. The way Hebrew works is that each word is built from a 3-letter root, made up of only consonants, thus in English we could transcribe this base word as sh-l-m (שׁלם). If we change the vowels according to certain rules, or add a prefix, we can also derive the words for “perfect” and “whole.” I am no expert (least not yet) in this realm called philology, but these literal meanings should inform the understanding of the word. Shalom is more than peace or simple tranquility; it is wholeness and well-being. In the context of the OT, it conveys the value of mutual flourishing, summarized by the command to love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18).

What has obsessed me about this topic is trying to understand why this practice is so powerful. Why is fasting efficacious? Why do I seem to at times find breakthrough when I have spent concentrated time in prayer and fasting, even though this is a normal, unremarkable, weekly practice for me? Do I really move God with my piety, or is it me that is moved instead?

Fasting in the Old Testament

The practice has its origins in the Ancient Near Eastern rites associated with mourning, which means wearing sackcloth and ashes, in addition to not eating. So many instances of fasting in the OT include some kind of mourning either for grief of loss; or anticipatory grief, when there is some threat on the horizon. It is a strong physical response to deeply disturbing events of life. Another important time when fasting was practiced in the Bible was on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. This was part of how they were commanded to observe this holy day, so there is some connection between fasting and repentance.

So what’s the big deal?

Why deprive yourself of food? When one is grieving or suffering in some way, it is easy to not want to eat, so this is a natural, physiological response. But when it is practiced regularly, in a kind of ritual way–meaning that it is not a responsive act only–something special can happen, if we have the right mindset.

There is a lot going on here, in terms of social dynamics, that is not so obvious to us when we read the OT. This practice of fasting was probably always accompanied by some sort of physical, outward sign, like wearing sackcloth and throwing ashes on one’s head. This, by the way, is why Jesus tells His followers in Matthew 6 to essentially do away with the outwardness of fasting, and to let it be an inward, secret practice of piety that is for you and God alone.

I won’t bore you with the philological details or the minutiae, but what can be summarized as a common thread of fasting in the OT is humility, and by extension, weakness. The idiom in Hebrew used to sometimes refer to fasting can be literally translated as to “afflict oneself.” This has connotations of and connections to shame, humility, diminishment, self-abasement… basically to make oneself small and insignificant.

But are we truly making ourselves smaller than we actually are when we throw ashes upon our heads, whether literally or figuratively? Or is it based in a recognition of our smallness and relative insignificance? Why deprive ourselves of food when we can become “hangry” in just a number of hours? Why should we, essentially, lean into and actually increase our weakness, even if just for a day?

My Hebrew teacher said once that, anthropologically, fasting is a way to shame the deity into action. As a woman of faith, I doubt that we can move or influence God in some way, but we can attune our prayers to His will better when we decenter our selves by fasting.

I have become painfully aware lately of my weaknesses and my limits. Nowadays, the most normal things like grocery shopping and taking public transportation can result in huge upheavals of anxiety. Yesterday I was on the bus for one hour, and today I am utterly wiped out from the extra effort of keeping myself calm and distracted during that period.

Think about it this way. When I say weakness, it should not sound like a dirty word, because we all have them. What other weaknesses do I carry? Vices? Bad habits? Nervous habits? Coping mechanisms? What unites all these things is an understanding that we are human. At our limits is where we find God.

Daily Bread

When I was constantly running around at my café job, I struggled to keep a fast twice a week, because I always felt too tired and hungry to tolerate another fast. But the typical peasant of the time would have been constantly in motion like me, except unlike me, they had no easy access to extra calories. Their labor was hand-to-mouth. The words “food” and “bread” are synonymous in Hebrew for that reason; that’s all they could afford, and it was the basis of sustenance. I wonder if peasants in that time weren’t edged with hunger at all times, constantly aware and thus constantly both thankful for and fearful of their subsistence and the fruitfulness of their crops.

So then, why willingly deprive yourself when you’re already hungry? According to the OT, it is so you see and help the poor and the oppressed. What fasting does is simultaneously heighten the threshold for personal suffering, and deepen a sense of compassion because of that suffering. (Read Isaiah 58.)

Conclusion: The Generation of Generosity

This is not just an intellectual exercise; it is changing how I live my life. The last number of months I have been facing financial uncertainty, and I have felt like I can’t afford to tithe, like I normally do. Despite the fear, I chose to give anyway, because if I hoard out of greed and hunger and fear, this will consume me, and I will be of no use to the people around me: my neighbors.

Generosity is not only financial, though that is an important part of practicing love for neighbor. For many months it has been my hope and prayer that this pandemic will result in deeper compassion for the other through acknowledging our own fears and weaknesses, and in so doing, loosen our resources to be at the ready for someone else who is in need.

The secret? We are all in need. The main principle is that if we develop in a spiritual discipline like fasting, and it does not benefit our neighbor, then we have failed. My challenge to you: how can you prioritize generosity in your life so that you can more sustainably give, and in so doing, create mutual flourishing?

This is why we pray that God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven. We are seeking shalom.

Read Part II here.
Heard it Through the Grapevine

June 19th, 2018

A wise friend once said to me that the Christian life is like trying to climb up the downward escalator: if you don’t keep climbing, you’re going to move down; there is no sitting still in the Christian life.

How do we keep climbing, then? Is it through the actions of prayer and bible reading, or through fasting? It’s actually much deeper than that; it’s about abiding.

Abide in Me

At its heart, fasting is replacing food during mealtimes with prayer and Bible reading. It is a deeper form of what should be our daily devotional time with Jesus. And our daily time with Jesus causes us to abide in Him.

Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:4-5 NRSV

The word “abide” means to remain, to continue, to endure.

There are many days when John 15 is all I read, and it is all I need. I return to it over and over in the mundane and the routine. The more I ponder it, the more it nourishes me.

How does fruit grow? Jesus gives an example of a grapevine. It is almost a silly question: the fruit lets itself be nourished by the vine; it abides, or remains, in the branch, and all the nutrition and water it needs will come to it. That is all it takes, and in some ways, the branch does nothing, but it abides.

The Discipline of Abiding

Christian life is not a matter of doing, but of being. This is what it means to abide in Christ, to abide in His love. It is an intimate connection to the life-giving Vine of Christ. If we disconnect, we die. Beyond the cultivation of healthy spiritual discipline (fasting, prayer, Bible reading), our goal is to be in constant fellowship with God throughout the day. In other words, to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

The spiritual nutrition we need, to live and to produce fruit, is the love of God. He is our Source, and we must abide in Him. It is the only way for us to thrive, for us to keep climbing upward toward heaven.

So think of fasting as holistic abiding; body, mind, and spirit. Fasting brings an outside-in and then inside-out transformation: we begin with a sacrifice in our bodies (fasting), which causes us to strengthen our willpower (using our minds) to choose Christ over food, which makes us more aware of our deep hunger for God’s love. As our spirits are nourished by His love and presence, He renews our minds (Romans 12:2), gives us His peace (Philippians 4:6-7), and this in turn gives life to our bodies!

A tranquil mind gives life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot. –Proverbs 14:30 NRSV

When fast, we sacrifice something good right now in order to receive God’s best for our lives. And the more we abide in His love, the more we see that God’s way really is the best. We begin to crave Him like we crave air.

As It Is in Heaven

We enter a heavenly way of being when we simply abide. Heaven is not a goal, it is not something to reach and check off the list. It is the place where all time will be transcended and we will abide in God’s love perfectly and continuously.

When we choose to abide we are letting God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We make His name holy (hallowed) in ourselves first and foremost, presenting our bodies as living sacrifices (Romans 12:1). We must pattern our lives after heaven, not because it is the goal we will achieve, but because it is the end result of our lives in Christ.

Abiding in Christ is a state of being, undefined by time, unhindered and unburdened. It is firstly by abiding, by BEING that we fulfill and enact God’s will, and not by doing or striving. Because He is the one who created time, He will be faithful to fill our days with things for His glory and our good. All other cares fall away when we re-center ourselves around the love of Christ. And in this simple way, we will produce fruit.

My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. –John 15:8-9 NRSV

(This is part three of a series on fasting. Part One is here, and Part Two is here.)
Fasting makes you HANGRY.

June 12th, 2018

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.)
A Different Kind of Body Positivity

June 10th, 2018

When we talk about our bodies, it usually makes us uncomfortable: we probably immediately think about our insecurities, or our physical health, or maybe just the fact that we’re slightly hungry…

When we talk about the body in church, it is usually when someone needs healing. But our bodies are so much more than that. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit, regardless of whether we are healthy or not, hungry or not, whole or not.

Let us put on our theological goggles and think more deeply about our bodies. In Romans 12:1 Paul encourages us to present our bodies as living sacrifices. What does this mean? Can we physically take up the cross, as Christ told us?

I would argue that the most basic way to take up our cross, physically, is through the spiritual discipline of regular fasting. Fasting is the sacrificing of food in search of something greater; intimacy with God.

The first post in this series will focus on fasting for the body, and the following posts will center around fasting for the mind, fasting for the spirit, and lastly, some practical advice for how to fast.

Spirit = Good, Body = Bad?

In the first and second centuries, there was a group of people who twisted ideas from Christianity into something called Gnosticism. They taught that the spirit realm was good, and that the physical realm was evil. They rejected their bodies because they wanted their souls to escape and be free. We still tend to think this way as Christians!

However, considering the fact that a disembodied soul, or an inanimate–soulless–body, is in fact, dead, we know that can’t be right. When sin entered the world with Adam and Eve, it introduced death into creation. That was not the original plan: we were created to be eternal.

Modern society would say that all we have is our bodies, so we may as well experience as much goodness and pleasure as we can in our short lifetimes. Many religions, on the other hand, from Buddhism to Scientology would say we must reject and be liberated from the physical world. At either extreme, it is about escape from suffering.

A Theology of Suffering

My choir teacher in Bible college used to tell us, “Embrace the dissonance.” The dissonance in the music we were singing, chords that hung in the air in tension, waiting to be resolved, served as a metaphor for the tensions and pains of life. In our lives, we must embrace the dissonance.

Christianity is the only religion that actually embraces suffering. Jesus came to earth specifically to suffer and die, and His bodily resurrection from the dead has sanctified our suffering so that it transforms us more into His likeness. In fact, the Christian hope for eternity is not simply to be in heaven where there is no suffering, but it is a hope for resurrection of the body, just like Christ was resurrected into a new, glorified body. (See 1 Corinthians 15.)

We really don’t like to suffer though, so we reject or ignore our bodies. After all, our main suffering usually comes through the body: hunger, thirst, tiredness, sexual desire, illness, physical pain. So, if we are already suffering in this present life, why would we want to add more suffering to the plate by willfully choosing to give up food for a day? This is because although we suffer through our bodies, it is not because of our bodies. We suffer because of the flesh.

It’s All Greek to Me…

Linguistically, in English, the words body and flesh are interchangeable: we even speak of Jesus as God in-the-flesh. Yet this is not what the flesh refers to in the New Testament. In Greek the flesh is sarx, and the body is soma. The difference between them is that the body (soma), is created by God, fashioned by His very hands, and redeemed in Christ. The flesh (sarx), is the sinful nature, which affects every aspect of human life; the spirit (pneuma), the mind (psyche), and the body (soma).

Gregory of Nyssa refers to Adam and Eve’s tunics of animal skin as representative of our sinful nature. (Genesis 3:21) Just like the story of Pandora’s Box, it is with these ‘tunics of skin’ that came all the sin and decay we know in life. And it is this sinful nature that we want to be rid of.

Paul tells us in Romans 13:14 “Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh (sarx).”

We will look more deeply at how fasting cultivates self-control in regards to fleshly desires in the next post. But to conclude this portion, we see that one way we can clothe ourselves in Christ is to choose to fast regularly. Fasting is a regular physical reminder to us of Christ’s sacrifice, and our own imitation of Him. We don’t fast to punish the body because of our wrong desires. We fast in order to live like Christ, and the Holy Spirit supernaturally makes us more like Him in the process.

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

Leslie Flores

Tag: fasting

True Fasting: An Apologia

What is true fasting?

Jesus’ Instructions for Christian Piety

Hypocritical Fasting

“‘Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?’” (58:3a).

Social Media “Fasting”

Seeking Shalom Part II: Fasting & Flourishing

He moved from there and dug another well, and they did not quarrel over it; so he called it Rehoboth, saying, “Now the Lord has made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.” Gen. 26:22

Boundary Lines

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage. Ps. 16:5-6

Hangriness & Bad Habits

Boundary Lines

Dwelling in Rehoboth

Self-Compassion is Compassion

Seeking Shalom: Fasting, Weakness, and Generosity

Introduction

Peace or Mutual Flourishing?

Fasting in the Old Testament

So what’s the big deal?

Daily Bread

Conclusion: The Generation of Generosity

Heard it Through the Grapevine

Abide in Me

Fasting makes you HANGRY.

Growing ‘Trees’ of Life

Theosis: Becoming Like God

A Different Kind of Body Positivity

Spirit = Good, Body = Bad?

A Theology of Suffering

It’s All Greek to Me…