Hungry for more

Every person hungers for God; it is a basic and primary desire of the human heart. However, this appetite for God is often mistaken for something else, leading us to glut ourselves on beauty, sex, power, achievement or a host of other good but lesser idols.

To keep the heart in touch with its true home - experiencing our hunger as for God - Christians have long practiced fasting. This practice, then, is a form of discernment, a way in which we better understand the movements of the heart. We are desiring beings and fasting guides us to properly order our desires and find fulfillment in the only thing that will satisfy: God and his Kingdom.

While this practice might seem novel to many today, it is an ancient practice. Jesus assumed this would be a normal practice of his disciples life when he gave corrective guidelines in the Sermon on the Mount, saying “And when you fast ...” (Matthew 6).

The practice of fasting is one of the disciplines of abstinence. These are “hard-sells” in a culture satiated on consumption and comfort, where marketers play up our desires and where having whatever we want is considered a near right. In such a world, self-denial seems at best quaintly puritanical and at worst incomprehensible: why go without?

Fasting is the practice of intentionally going without, purposefully withdrawing something from our lives. It is a deliberate interference in the normal routine of our lives intended to wake us up to what is most important, most central. We’re all familiar with the cases of people who have had health or job withdrawn from their lives. Life is reduced, pulled back to basics and in that place the experience is often one of epiphany, finding a sense of life and awareness of God deepened.

Pastor and author Eugene Peterson calls these practices of abstinence a “voluntary disaster.” Instead of waiting for disease or unemployment to come our way for us to experience its benefit, we voluntarily withdraw a good in order to experience the mercy of God that is the foundation of all things.

In the practice of fasting, we remove from our lives something we consider a normal and good desire. Traditionally it’s been a fast from food, removing from our lives, for a day or longer, the preparation, consumption and tidying up after of meals (just imagine the time fasting would free up to engage God in prayer and scripture). We abstain from food, and possibly from drink (but not water), in order to free us up to encounter God through prayer and Word.

Fasting from food is the basic fast because food is so elemental and daily to our living. In withdrawing it for a time, fasting helps us recognize the power that certain appetites can hold over us and seeks to find in Jesus the true source of satisfaction for the empty growls of our hungering hearts. (Matt. 6:16-18)

However fasting can take many other forms. In our media saturated culture, fasting might take the form of withdrawing form of media or technological devices for a time (perhaps connect it to sabbath and unplug for 24 hours from your smart phone). In our consumer culture, a “buy nothing” fast can help to name how we try to stuff that God-shaped hole with material goods. The type of fast may be different for each person but the goal is the same: to discern unhealthy attachments to something and voluntarily “going without” to experience more of God.

We so quickly and easily fill our hunger for God with many other comforts. Yet as Jesus notes, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)

Another aspect of fasting is solidarity with the poor. This is especially important for those of us in the wealthy west, a culture of excess and luxury that makes us “ill with want” as the Avett Brothers sing. The prophet Isaiah reminds us of the Kingdom vision lying behind the practice of fasting: developing an appetite for the justice of God’s Kingdom.

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter — when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. (Isaiah 58)

And so we fast in order to feast on God, becoming aware that the rumblings of our heart for so many different things are indeed a hungering after our Creator and Redeemer. In fasting we feast on God’s Kingdom, tuning our appetites to hunger and thirst for righteousness in this world.