The Philosophy of Fasting

The Philosophy of Fasting

The philosophy of fasting is that it expresses repentance and it uncovers the life to God. It is the voluntary disuse of anything innocent in itself – it is the forsaking of the good for the best – with a view to spiritual culture. It does not apply to food alone, but to everything which a man may desire.

The more we watch the lives of men, the more we see that one of the reasons why men are not occupied with great thoughts and interests, is the way in which our lives are overfilled with little things. It is not that we despise the highest hopes and interests of our immortal nature that you neglect them so, it is mainly that your passions crowd so thick about you that you’re entirely occupied with them. It is untrue picture of the lives of many of us if we imagine ourselves that is, our wills, standing in the center, and close about each man a crowd of clamorous passions and eager lusts, while outside of them there awaits the higher claimants of our time and powers; truth and charity and religion. A man sometimes puts out his hand, parts and pushes aside this clamorous crowd, physical appetites, and secular ambitions. He says to them, “stand back and, at least for a few moments, let me hear what truth and charity and religion have to say to my soul.” Then up to the emptiness that he has made there pours the rich company of higher interests, and they gather for a time around the soul which belongs to them, but from which they have been shut away.

Pride, doubt and then a conscience, among the men and women who live easy, thoughtless lives, is started and someone looks up and says, “Is it wrong? Is it wicked to do this?” And when they get their answer, “No certainly not evil!”, then they go back and give their whole lives up to doing their innocent little pieces of uselessness again. The question is not whether that is weakness, God will punish you for doing that, the question is whether that thing is keeping other and better things away. And with it, the vast privilege and dignity of duty is hid in a stance between God and your soul. Put aside everything that hinders the highest from coming to us, and then call to that highest who is always waiting to come; fasting and prayer, as the habit of life, it is noble. As an occasional deference it is real and earnest, it makes the soul freer for the future.

What then is fasting? If our souls are sinful and are shut, let us, at least for a few days; proclaim by soberness and quietude of life that we know our responsibility and how often we have abandoned it. By some small symbols let us bear witness that we know something of the solemnity of living, the dreadful mistakes, and the struggle of repentance. Our symbols may be very feeble, our sack cloth may be lined with silk and our actions scented with the juice of roses, but let us do something that breaks the mere monotony of complacent living, which seems to be forever saying over to itself that there is no such thing as sin, but to live is light and easy work. Perhaps as we tell God of what little sorrow for our sins we have, our sorrow may be increased, and while we stand there in His presence the fasting may give us a truer reality of repentance behind it. And as we realize that our redemption is rooted in divine self-sacrifice, we abandon human self-indulgence.

Saint Bernard is quoted to have said: “Who so the holy place would enter in, must pray and fast for steadfast to grace, to turn from all that hides the father’s face; must fast from every sweet that tends to sin.”

Fasting is an expression of hungering after God, of grief that we know Him so little, though we might know him so well. Fasting is a seeking after God without whom we cannot live. It is the abandonment for a time of lesser blessings that we may strengthen the appeal which we make for the higher. Our fasting is to be the fasting of love, and the blessing that we seek to buy it is the fuller knowledge of God himself. But after all it is but a help in the quest. The Word says, “Turn towards me with all of your heart.”

We are to turn to God as an actual living person. It would not be enough to turn from our sins, we must turn to God, and be restored to right relationships with Him. In our best moments we say I will arise but we do not add and go to my father, and so even be, rising comes to little or nothing. We must make a new effort to have a communion time with God. Though turning to God means more than turning from sin, it undoubtedly involves that, and it will fail unless the turning from sin is real. “Turn to me with all of your heart.” The heart includes much more than the affections, it includes all that is within us that is the will, which is of primary importance. To turn to God with our entire heart is to turn to him with the one desire of doing His whole will, and doing nothing else. What has been the main cause of our sins in the past? Not that we were obstinately set upon what was definitely evil, it was that we were what James calls double minded. We desire to do right, if it did not cost us too much. But we were not willing to make the sacrifices of pleasure which doing right demands. To turn to God with all our hearts is to turn to him with the deliberate intention of doing his will, whatever it may cost, whatever we may have to abandon for it. So let us offer our intentions to God during this time of fasting and regard them not primarily as a self discipline, but as a spontaneous expression of love and sorrow which we could not abandon without necessity.

Are there any dangers in fasting that we ought to guard against? The fast must be the free action of the individual, without external obligation, so that it may really be his own will, which is required to own the blessing spoken of by our Lord. Again a man must not allow into his motives any doubt of the all embracing sufficiency of God’s love and of Christ’s sacrifice. A man must not see the act of fasting as a business transaction, for by doing so he can lessen the building of the relationship with God. In similar fashion no man must imagine that there is any virtue in the mere fact of undergoing pain or that there is any pleasure to God in seeing us in its grip. On the other hand a fast may be a legitimate expression of penitence, a means of helping us to realize the hideousness of our sin. If the one who fasts esteems himself as more spiritual than another who does not, if he looks upon his fast as a more pleasing offering as compared to others and parades his own fasting, then that man will have his reward. There is another side to that truth. A time of fasting may at the very least remind us that Christ does call us to something higher and more noble than physical comfort. For the Christian in this exercise of fasting, we prove that to fast, the one thing they need involves the letting go of other things which are desirable and that in thought, as well as in action, he must steadily narrow his way for exchanging the good for the best.

The deeper we go, the wider the possibilities of us entertaining a profitable fast. We dare not pour out our hearts on altars by the wayside chosen at our own pleasure. God Himself points to the place where our sacrifices must be offered up. To Abraham, his Friend (Jehovah) said,” take out thy son, thy only son … and offer him upon one of the mountains that I will tell thee of.” As God Himself must be the supreme object of our spiritual surrender, so God Himself shows us that our sacrifice must be complete not only in motive but in detail. He who claims the offering must also choose the altar. And the willing surrender of our will to His becomes a part of our ever building relationship with God, without which we cannot be made perfect. A general known only to me by the name of General Gordon, penetrated to the root of the whole matter when he said, “I learned that to be like Christ, we must not only have our will subordinated to his, but we must be delighted to have it so.”