March 1, 2022 + Ash Wednesday + Smithtown.
In Matthew 6, Jesus talks about the three pillars of spiritual practice. They are prayer, giving alms, and fasting. Jesus doesn't say "if" you do these things, he says "when." He assumes anyone seriously involved in the spiritual life would already be engaged in these activities.
We know that prayer is kind of basic. And most of us understand that giving of the resources we have to others in need is also important. All of us do both of these things, I hope. Certainly we can do them better and with more consciousness, knowledge, and faithfulness. But we at least know they are essential to do.
The one we have a problem with, generally, is fasting. There are historical reasons for this, rooted in the Reformation. All the Reformers understood fasting to be beneficial. What they objected to were the oppressive and silly Medieval Roman Catholic rules about it. But unfortunately, people took the removal of those rules as permission to abandon the practice altogether. Our egocentric inclinations took over, which were then greatly buttressed by our consumer-driven economy and society. Which meant that many Presbyterians do not fast. Ever. I have known Presbyterians who were convinced that if they were to go without food for a whole day they would literally die. We frame fasting as an example of mindless religious legalism at best, or at worst, a self-hating form of asceticism on a par with the bloody, masochistic, self-flagellation done by monks in the Dark Ages. As if it were a form of self-punishment.
Of course, were fasting really either of those things Jesus would not recommend the practice to us. Clearly something else is going on.
The purpose of all spiritual practices is self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-discovery. They help us discover the truth, which is that we are not who we think we are, and that who we truly are is unknown to us. Spiritual practices are technologies by which we become aware of this. They help us move from our old, false self to our new, original, true Self. The apostle Paul framed it as a shift from being influenced by the "flesh" to being under the Spirit. We may follow our ego, which separates us from the world, or by God's grace we may follow our Essence, which is Christ-in-us, through whom we are connected to all people, all of life, all creation, and the Creator.
Fasting is in some ways the epitome of a spiritual practice because it reveals the fundamental direction of our interaction with everything, from God to the world. Is our existence about what we gain, or what we give? Is it about what we take, or what we share? Is it about what we kill and devour, or how we give life to each other?
By intentional and prayerful fasting we move from unconscious consumption to conscious connection. We come to realize that if and what and how we eat are choices. What we choose reveals our spiritual condition.
Fasting shows, on the one hand, that we are slaves to our egos, and we approach the world with the mentality of a vacuum cleaner, with the point of life being to get, to take, to acquire, to gain, to receive, to devour, and to absorb, with the direction being exclusively one-way, towards me, for my benefit, feeding me, sustaining me. It is all about me.
This is in fact the ideology of the Modern world: to consume with abandon and reduce the Earth to "resources" for extraction and commodities for sale. It is all about consumption. We even define humans as "consumers." We have been trained to do this almost unconsciously; certainly we do it mostly uncritically, assuming it is necessary and inevitable. It is a message we get from every side. Our economy and culture demands consumption, which means there is nothing more antithetical to our Modern way of life than fasting. A deliberate choice not to consume is the most subversive thing a person can do.
On the other hand, fasting can shake us awake to see our dependence on others, and therefore our connection to everything. We literally are what we eat. Our bodies are physically constructed out of nutrients we acquire in eating and drinking. By eating we are connected in remarkably intimate ways with people and life-forms, soil and water.
Fasting may also encourage us to consider deeper questions of where our food comes from? Who grew it and harvested it? How was it processed? How did it get here? Who transported it, and sold it? What effect does all of this have on the larger systems upon which we depend for life? My blueberries come from Chile. My tea comes from Sri Lanka. We get rice from Vietnam, and cheese from Wisconsin. My honey comes from an apiary in Southampton. Was all this food production and delivery done with justice and fairness and equity? Was it done sustainably and responsibly?
More to the point, am I benefitting from evil? Am I underwriting slavery and pollution and deforestation and the unspeakable horrors of the way we mass produce meat?
Fasting as a spiritual discipline makes us realize that we are the Earth and that we all depend on each other to live, and that what we do to one part of the system necessarily effects all the other parts.
When we combine fasting with prayer, we give thanks to God our Creator for all we receive, and at the same time confess our complicity in systems of destruction. And when we combine fasting with giving alms, we make material amends to those who suffer from our irresponsible consumption. Thereby we witness to God's new world of justice and shalom in which everyone has enough, which is the original intent of creation.
In the end, living as a disciples of Jesus Christ means seeing ourselves not as consumers, but as mutual participants in a miraculous system of mutual nourishment and blessing. This season of Lent is intended to wake us up to the fact that we are existing most of the time according to other values and life-styles. The heart of Lent is fasting. In some Christian traditions Lent is called just that, "The Fast."
And I know, fasting can just be an ego-centric feat of physical achievement or done with some selfish ulterior motive, like fitting into my old jeans. But the real heart of it is connection. It is realizing our dependence one each other and the Earth, and reshaping our lives to live more justly, humbly, gratefully, joyfully, and reciprocally.
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