Lessons from Fasting Failure
This year for Lent, I took on the discipline of fasting before the Eucharist. It doesn’t quite rank up there with St Antony of the Desert’s heroic efforts of asceticism, but my spiritual director felt that they would be a good discipline for me. My tendency is to want to take on more, do more, accomplish more, and so any discipline of letting go, of self-denial, is going against the grain for me – and is therefore all the more necessary.
I can tell that it’s a necessary discipline, because it’s going quite badly.
To begin with, the idea of fasting before morning mass filled me with trepidation. I like breakfast. I feel that breakfast is necessary. What’s more, my schedule means that if I don’t have breakfast on the days I go to church, I won’t eat until lunchtime. I go to the 9 AM mass on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then have just enough time to have coffee or run an errand or two before I go to work, and on Sundays I go to the 10:45 AM mass, which means that I’m not home from church till probably 1 PM. I explained all this to my spiritual director. “My blood sugar might get low, and I’ll get a headache,” I said.
“Well, then, bring a granola bar and eat it on the way to work,” Fr Doran replied.
He wouldn’t let me off the hook.
That first Tuesday I anxiously contemplated the lengthy stretch of time before I would be able to eat, but lo and behold! I survived. Even Sunday was not a problem. In fact, when I got home from church I even just had a light meal, a bowl of soup, and felt completely satisfied.
First lesson learned: as a well-fed American in good health, I am not going to starve to death, or have any ill consequences whatsoever, if I skip a meal a couple times a week. (I found myself reflecting on the difference between my own self-chosen circumstances and those of people who have no choice but to go hungry.)
Second lesson learned: my anxiety was about control, not hunger. I was afraid of being hungry; I was afraid of not feeling well. My fears dictated my actions, so that I didn’t just prefer to eat breakfast, I felt that I had to eat breakfast, whether or not I felt hungry at that moment. I began to see that fasting was a way of recognizing the ways in which our bodies control us, rather than the other way around.
The next week, I thought: “I can do this!” My confidence was raised higher by the fact that one day, I ended up not having a chance to eat lunch either, and yet I managed to get through the day just fine. “Now that’s discipline!” I told myself. Rising above the physical, subjugating the desires of the flesh to the control of a well-ordered mind, and all that.
As you might guess, I was headed for a fall.
I remembered the desert fathers and thought, “If they could live a prayerful and productive life with just one simple meal a day, I can too!” (O Lord, have mercy on me.) I skipped breakfast, didn’t worry about having a snack, didn’t worry about fitting in time for lunch into a busy day…
… and by the end of the day, found myself exhausted. True, I didn’t feel hungry. I also didn’t feel like praying. I didn’t feel like reading. I didn’t feel like writing or working, either. In fact, I didn’t feel like doing anything but sitting apathetically in my armchair. Finally I roused myself sufficiently to reheat some leftovers in the microwave.
An hour later, I felt enormously better. All of a sudden I had energy! I felt able to do some work – to think clearly!
And I realized the obvious: I need to eat. I am not some sort of spiritual superwoman; if I don’t eat, I don’t have energy to do the work that I need to do – certainly not to do it well. I felt like a failure. “I can’t do this. I need to quit this discipline. I can’t handle fasting! I’ll tell Fr. Doran that I’m giving up.”
To put the final icing on the cake, as it were, this past Sunday at church a few of my fellow parishioners were talking about fasting before the Eucharist, which it turns out they all do as a matter of course. Here I was, thinking I was actually doing something worthwhile by taking this on as a Lenten discipline, and it’s something most people take for granted. I felt like an idiot.
I think I’m starting to see the point of fasting.
I’ve managed to hit the extremes: obsessive attention to making sure I eat regularly, and careless inattention to whether I eat at all; cowardice about suffering any bodily discomfort whatsoever, and spiritual pride over being able to ignore my bodily needs; a sense of personal merit for taking on this discipline, and a feeling of personal embarrassment at being behind when I thought I was ahead.
To discipline something is to train it in the way that it should go. If there is one thing that I have seen so far in this experiment of fasting, it is my own need for discipline.
My nature is to go to extremes – and most of all, to go to the extreme of trying to do more, be better, work harder. My natural response to failure is to castigate myself. What an idiot I was, to be proud of myself, to think I was doing so well, to consider even for a moment that there was special merit in taking on this discipline. What was I thinking?
Since I recognize (rather belatedly) that I am not going to climb the summits of asceticism, at least not during this particular Lenten season, it is tempting to give up on the project altogether. It’s easier to turn aside from the path than to recognize that I am only one tiny, tiny step forward on it, and that the path leads up, up, up ahead of me, with many people farther along than I am (not just older and wiser, but younger people too).
Fasting is not really about managing my desire for food, but about managing my desire for success, and the control (or sense of control) that comes with success. It’s one more facet of the same challenge that I recognized, and feared, before I became a Christian: “Your will be done, not mine.”
That’s never easy, is it?
I suppose that’s why Our Lord says “When you fast…”
Not if, but when. He knows we need practice letting go.
Related posts:
- Ash Wednesday
- The Spiritual Disciplines: The Wings of Prayer
- Experiments with a Lenten Cupboard
- Starting Fresh Every Day
- Useful Restlessness
5 Responses to “Lessons from Fasting Failure”
Dr Holly Ordway came to Christ through reason, in the pursuit of truth. "In your hearts honor Christ as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 15).
She writes about her journey from atheism to orthodox Christian faith in her book "Not God's Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith" (Moody Publishers).
I admire your attempts to take on greater discipline in your religious life. That is to be commended. As an Orthodox, I am expected to fast after midnight when I want to partake of Communion. However, I take several medications, and this is not possible. But I will say that not eating before Communion is very difficult for me. It has not gotten easier.
And I will agree with you that saying, “Your will be done, not mine,” is so hard for me; there are many areas in my life where I currently do this–and I want to be able to control what is going on around me in my life.
One of the challenges for me is to not make the discipline into an end in itself… and not feeling guilty if I don’t “get it right” or “do it perfectly.” If I found that skipping a meal really did make me ill (as it would if I were diabetic, for instance) then I’d have to recognize my own weakness and accept it…which is probably harder than the discipline itself
Another part of my Lenten discipline this year is quite simply to get sufficient rest. I tend to work too hard (and too much) and so I am working on accepting that I am not strong enough to do without sleep! Giving up overwork is actually turning out to be a real challenge in its own right.
I too have tried fasting, but I always end simply up eating less than normal which is, to be honest, not a true fast. I rather like the idea of fasting from TV or mindless novel reading; I might have more success than the fasting from food. One year I tried “giving up” coffee, but that lasted less than a half day since I couldn’t function without it. Perhaps if I’d persisted, I could have done it. This year my disciplines have been pretty punky–in fact I can’t even remember what my pledge was. Writing these things down might be a good thing for next Lent!
I ended up having to stop fasting before the Eucharist. I ended up feeling really lousy, even if I had a snack on the way to work, so that it made it hard for me to have enough energy to teach my classes at 100%. On the other hand, I realized that it wasn’t a “failure,” because the experience did cause me to reflect on my own weakness and face up to my own limitations, even if in a very limited way.
You might be interested in this small quote from Met. Kallistos from “The Meaning of the Great Fast” in the introduction to the Lenten Triodion:
“The primary aim of fasting is to make us conscious of our dependence upon God. If practised seriously, the Lenten abstinence from food – particularly in the opening days – involves a considerable measure of real hunger, and also a feeling of tiredness and physical exhaustion. The purpose of this is to lead us in turn to a sense of inward brokenness and contrition; to bring us, that is, to the point where we appreciate the full force of Christ’s statement, ‘Without Me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). If we always take our fill of food and drink, we easily grow over-confident in our own abilities, acquiring a false sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency.”
I grant you, this is in reference to the Lenten fast (the first few days of which, if following the rule for those days, is extraordinarily difficult for us in our pampered society), but the same principles apply.