Ok, so how do I do it?

Last week I waded in pretty deep about two purposes of fasting: subduing the flesh and getting closer to God. I've experienced a lot of the first one. Perhaps you can tell. I'm becoming acquainted with the second. In fact, I'm learning that no matter how much I give up to subdue the flesh, if I'm not prepared to beat it all down -- food, sex, entertainment, daily routine -- there's still a lot of it to get in between me and God. On the other hand, I find that when I strictly limit what I'm giving up (because I have a tendency to overdo and try to earn the quality of my fasting), I experience keen gratitude for the blessings that I still have. The other day, I was almost overwhelmed because even though we're not eating meat, I can still have pudding.

There is a critical balance to this spiritual exercise that requires constant vigilance. Not that you have to ride a line, but you do have to tip in the right direction. Simple deprivation is not enough to achieve the purposes of fasting; there has to be time set aside to read, pray, and listen as well. This is tricky. I'm the mom of a toddler who thinks she can't use the potty unless I'm sitting on the bathtub smiling at her. I get up with her in the morning, and before I know it, she's back in bed, my husband is brushing his teeth, and I'm dragging in the saddle thinking, "Wait, I meant to meditate today . . . as well as exercise, write a page or two, and make granola. Where did all my time go?"

The first step, nevertheless, is to give up something necessary to you. After that, other things will fall into place. All of my sources insist that true fasting consists of giving up food. They insist on it. Well, food is kind of necessary. It certainly drives the body's longings. And John Calvin notes, “We certainly experience that after a full meal, the mind does not so rise toward God as to be borne along by an earnest and fervent longing for prayer, and perseverance in prayer.” But I think that fasting should also mean giving up something that connects to the mind.

 The way fasting works, I think, is to create a sense of longing that we aren't allowed to satisfy. The body longs for food; the mind longs for distraction or habitual activity. When that longing is thwarted, we have two choices: we can find something temporal to replace it, or we can reach higher and look to God who satisfies all our needs.  The mind can be used to distract from a physical longing, just like the body can be used to distract from a mental or emotional pain.  In order to truly make room for God, I think we need to set up abstention in both. 

 In all my experiences with fasting (that would be eight of them), I have two strong memories of growth.  Once I gave up reading fiction for 40 days.  My husband was at sea; I wasn't yet a mom. Normally during those periods, I would depend on books for distraction when my loneliness became overwhelming. In this case, having cut myself off from my normal sense of relief, I began to feel the excess mental energy begin to pile up on me.  The feeling was very uncomfortable until I learned to devote that time to Scripture reading and prayer.  By the end of the 40 days, it was no longer a habit for me to grab a novel to distract me from the loneliness. I could go to God instead.  The habit weakened as I found other distractions later, but I would say that the impulse to go to God is still stronger than it was before.

The other memory is tied to giving up processed sugar for 40 days.  It was during this fast that I realized that the body does not require full mental consent to act. If the habit or craving is strong enough, the subject can be halfway through the action before she realizes what's happened. There was one morning when I found Fruit Loops in my cereal bowl and didn't remember pouring them. Then came the dilemma -- I had already poured milk on them. Should I eat them anyway or throw them away? You know sometimes God does require us to throw away an investment in the face of temptation.

 I also learned that my body exerts a lot more control over me than I thought it would. There were moments that I actually thought I would go crazy if I couldn't have the sugary thing I was craving. Does that sound like any temptation you've encountered lately? The devil often uses the flesh to present us with a false dilemma. "Have this or face the consequences," he says. Fasting helps us realize that the consequences of staying on the straight and narrow aren't nearly as grim as we think they are (Hickey, 2012).

So I would recommend giving up something physical and something mental at the same time. Look for something that you use when you're stressed or sad, an emotional crutch, or something that kind of dominates your diet mentally or physically.

Regarding food, there are a whole bunch of ways you can go about it. A lot of cultures give up the one or another of the animal proteins for a period. This is a traditional Lenten fast. Another traditional fast is to give up everything except bread, water, juice, honey, and nuts.  Most of the Biblical fasts I have read about involve giving up food completely for a time. The children of Israel were instructed to do this on the Day of Atonment, and Daniel, Nehemiah, David, Esther, and Samuel all fasted this way at one time or another to seek help from God.   Not everyone can do this. If you do fast completely, make sure you drink plenty of water and keep the fast to a reasonable length.

Then set aside time to pray and keep that appointment. Get others to help you keep it because everything and anything will want to interfere.

On the other hand, there is one fast where you may be inclined to give up everything. This is the spontaneous fast that comes from deep emotion or happens under the hand of the Holy Spirit. This is the kind of fast that Nehemiah undertook when he heard about the state of Jerusalem or Moses undertook on Sinai while waiting for the law. It's a fast that comes from deep distress that just takes away your appetite.  You can honestly say, "I would rather pray than eat at a time like this." By praying at times like these, some people have averted catastrophes. Calvin puts such fasts under the discipline of the church and calls it a duty of pastors to sometimes call for congregational prayer and fasting when the Lord's judgment seems to be impending on a nation (Institutes 4.12.17).

 Just be sure to be done when you're done praying. You can't force the Lord's hand by giving up food entirely. Fast. Pray. Put it in the Lord's hand. Be confident that you have been heard.  Then go eat.

Calvin, John. (1539). The Institutes of the Christian Religion, kindle ed. Henry Beveridge, Esq., trans. MobileReference.

Marilyn Hickey. The Power of Prayer and Fasting. The Christian Broadcasting Network. (Accessed February 16, 2012.) http://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/prayerandcounseling/intercession/Hickey_PrayerFasting06a.

Part Two: The Purpose of Fasting and the quality of Good Funnies

Charles Schultz once wrote in a forward of another artist's work that a good comic has to be more than an illustrated joke.  It has to be drawn in a funny way too.  It was a principle he drew as well as wrote.  Boogaloo found the Peanuts comic in this Sunday's paper and busted up laughing. 

 Now I know she didn't get the joke because she can't read yet and the concept was above her head anyway, but there was this one panel where Lucy freaks out because Snoopy kissed her, and Lucy's mouth was so wide and her eyes were so big and her scream was all in letters that Boogaloo knew ("Aaaaaaaaaa."), so Boogaloo knew exactly what was happening.  She kept going back to that panel so finally I read it for her, and all we heard for the rest of the day was "Aaaaah, getsim water.  Getsim disinfecant.  I kiss a dog." 

***

The Purpose of Fasting

“A holy and lawful fast has three ends in view. We use it either to mortify and subdue the flesh that it might not be wanton, or to prepare the better for prayer and holy meditation, or to give evidence of humbling ourselves before God when we would confess our guilt before him.”

~ John Calvin (Institutes 4.12.15).

My husband looked up from his computer game about two weeks ago with a serious look on his face. “Love,” he said. “I think we should give up meat for Lent.” I looked up from my computer, pleasantly surprised. I hadn't really expected him to give up anything for Lent. In the past, he’s gone along supportively with whatever I cook up, but it’s always been my “thing.”

Then he threw a kink in my elation. “I really feel like we need to alter our eating habits. We need to include more vegetables. Protein and starches are helping me a little bit too much.” I didn’t say anything, but I crinkled my internal brow a bit because I wasn’t sure if revising one’s eating habits was a real reason for fasting. Certainly it would be good for us, but would it really be a fast?

Not really. True fasting has one essential component: humbling one’s self before God. Mortifying the flesh, Calvin calls it, that it might not become wanton. Mortifying. Now that’s an interesting word. It calls to mind both embarrassment and death at the same time. “I am so embarrassed that I could just die. I am mortified.” Why on earth would we want to do that to our bodies?

Well, for starters, the “flesh” is not just the body. It’s anything that has to do with our carnal appetites. Attention to food could fall under the category of the flesh, but so could attention to clothes, a hunger for thrills, an obsession with movies, or a need for prestige. The flesh is the hungry, appetitious part of the human being, the part that says, “Feed me. Feed me.” And it has a tendency to get out of control. In fact, the flesh is kind of like a toddler. It runs all over the place and does it wants and takes what it wants. It doesn’t always want bad things, but it recognizes only its wants, and it’s prepared to throw a fit if it doesn’t get what it wants. It’s also prepared to keep pushing the issue until you give in.

Think about your thought patterns for the last half hour. If you were to divide your thoughts into spiritual, soulful, or carnal, where would most of them fall? Most of mine, and I don’t think I’m unique, would fall into the carnal category. My head hurts a little, I like the way my new jeans fit, and gosh, my schedule is full today. If that were all there were to life, we’d be in great shape. But it isn’t. If we let our flesh dominate all of our thoughts and actions, then the Creator who made us and saves us gets pushed aside without his due honor and our fellow human beings who are made in his image get pushed aside without their due attention and love. If that’s where all our thoughts are, then that’s where all our actions will be.
Therefore, we fast. Marilyn Hickey put it this way: “Abstaining from food is often God's way of showing that His desire for us is that we regain mastery over all things associated with our flesh in order to subdue our flesh and elevate our emphasis on spiritual matters.”

In other words, fasting is when we make our spirit and our soul say to our flesh, “Your are the toddler. I am the mommy. God is the Daddy. It’s his house, and I’m in charge of it, so what we say goes.” And then we stick to what we’ve said until the flesh says, “All right, spirit. I can do that. I want to help you obey God and make the world a better place. Helping is fun.” Just like teaching and disciplining a toddler, subduing the flesh can be very unpleasant. It takes time. It takes consistency. It requires being the bully sometimes and a lot of “Because I said so” but the only way to have a smoothly functioning household is if the parents are in charge, and the kids have learned to be happy about it. And just like wrestling with a todder, fasting will teach you how weak and inconsistent you are inclined to be.

But subduing the flesh is only the first purpose for fasting, just like discipline is only a means of making a child capable of other things. When the flesh is no longer running amock but playing quietly in the corner, the spirit can sit down before God and say, “Lord, we need to talk.” When the flesh isn’t whining to be fed, held, or entertained, the spirit can sit with God and talk and listen and resolve issues and make plans. Heart hurts can be addressed. Weaknesses can be weeded out. Deep communion can take place. It's not a sequential process.  Sometimes the internal todder gets cranky and has to be reminded what it's supposed to be doing.  But as the demands of the flesh get weaker, the spirit has more energy to pursue God. 

Michael Fackerell, missionary and mediator of the Christian Faith Site, puts the relationship between the two this way: “Fasting gives you God's focus for your life. It is a major key to hearing God's voice (the other is true worship - the two are related). We need focus from God more than anything. The world we live in is working overtime to distract us, to entice us, to win our hearts and minds, our focus, and to determine our vision. Fasting cuts out the world so we can tune into God. If we are obedient to God, fasting will make us catalysts for revival and awakening.”

He also says, “Fasting is not magic, nor does it twist the arm of God. God wants to do many amazing things, but He looks for those willing to urgently make the corrections needed to come into line with him.”

Make no mistake. God is still in the business of changing the world, and we are his chosen vessels for doing so. Fasting is a means of emptying the vessel that is placed before God, namely ourselves, and then waiting for him to fill it and put it where he wants it to be. Fasting puts us, individually or corporately, in our correct place before God so that He can do the work that He wants to do. When done with the proper spirit, it shows God that we honor His greatness and recognize our own weakness and need.

P.S. For the record, I am not trying to imply that my husband is unspiritual.  Later last week, Seth said, "I think we should also read Proverbs during Lent on top of our regular Bible reading.  After all, it doesn't matter what you give up if you aren't trying to make more room for God." 

Calvin, John. (1539). The Institutes of the Christian Religion, kindle ed. Henry Beveridge, Esq., trans. MobileReference.

Fackerell, Michael. (2011.) Fasting and Prayer: Key to Power. Christian Faith. (accessed February 22, 2012) http://www.christian-faith.com/forjesus/fasting-key-power

Marilyn Hickey. The Power of Prayer and Fasting. The Christian Broadcasting Network. (Accessed February 16, 2012.) http://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/prayerandcounseling/intercession/Hickey_PrayerFasting06a.

New haircut and something on a more serious note.

New haircut. 

No, really? 

Yes, I'm afraid so.  I, who took pride in having long, simple hair (silly the things we ponder in absence of real thought, isn't it?), have cut off my hair and gotten it layered.  My primary purpose is medical.  Maybe if my head is lighter, I won't have as many headaches.  My poor neck will get a break.  My hair hasn't been this short since I had a hormonal moment when I was pregnant with Boogaloo and hacked all my hair off at the shoulder. 

This haircut is much nicer.  I like it a lot.  Moreover, Seth keeps looking at me and saying, "I do like your new haircut."  That settles it.  It's no mean thing to cut off four years of growth in one fell swoop, but now that I've done it, I think I'll keep it this way.  As I get older, I find that layers aren't the hazards to style that I once thought they were.  In fact, they can be quite elegant if my technique is right.  My neck is happier already, showers are shorter, and it's fun to flip my hair out of my face without getting my fingers caught in the tangles. 

At the same time, Boogaloo got a new haircut, but hers was for a different reason.  Once again, my little explorer found a pair of scissors and gave herself a makeover.  The results this time were so drastic that the only way to compensate was an extreme pixie cut.  She cut her bangs so short that even the stylist was flummoxed.  Said stylist commented that in like circumstances, she'd just shave the kid bald and let them deal with it.  These are the memories that I'm going to rehash in the presence of her first boyfriend.  (evil snicker)

***

On a more serious note, I'm going to be thinking a bit about fasting for the next few weeks.  After all, Lent begins next week.  Carnival, as my local newspaper advertisements are happy to tell me, is in full swing.  After Carnival, the festival  of the flesh, comes Lent, the season of mortifying the flesh and focusing on higher things, but the advertisers aren't so keen on that one.  There isn't much money to be made in self-discipline. 

Do we fast?  Not just as an exercize but as an actual means of humbling ourselves before God?  I know that some Catholics fast regularly and some Pentacostal churches encourage fasting as a means to reach spiritual ends, but I don't see a lot of it in Reformed or mainstream traditions.  Marylin Hickey, author of The Power of Prayer and Fasting, says that in her experience, many Christians have never been taught about the connection between prayer and fasting or its purposes.  They simply assume that fasting is something the church doesn't do anymore.  As one godly woman asked her in all sincerity, "Prayer and fasting.  Didn't those go out of style decades ago?" 

More like centuries.  John Calvin encountered a similar attitude when he was trying to bring the church back to godly habits in the 16th Century.  Some critics even suggested to him that the time for fasting had passed with the Old Testament Church, to which Calvin replied, “The sackcloth and ashes, indeed, were perhaps more suitable for those times, but the assembly, and weeping and fasting, and the like, undoubtedly belong, in an equal degree, to our age, whenever the condition of our affairs so requires." (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.12.17)  Israel did it; Nineveh did it. Jesus never did away with it; he just told his disciples to wait until he was gone. Therefore, Calvin asserts, “In the present day, it is an admirable help to believers, as it always was, and a useful admonition to arouse them, lest by too great security and sloth they provoke the Lord more and more when they are chastened by his rod.” (ibid., 4.12.17)  

Now when was the last time, Rick Perry not withstanding, that you heard of the church calling for fasting and prayer?  And yet, show me one Christian who is perfectly satisfied with the direction of our country, the activity of the Church, or the state of the world right now?  Is it possible that we're missing something?  Perhaps we'd rather get snarky about whose fault it is than turn to the Lord and ask him to fix it. 

I never was much into fasting until I got involved in 40 Days for Life.  I regarded it as something extra that Christians could do but that smacked of superficiality in most people. After all, it requires quite a bit of emotion to drive someone to spontaneously give up food.  Most of the people in my acquaintance, being the strong, silent Reformed types, don't show that kind of emotion willingly.  Ergo, I thought, fasting was simply part of a formula, and we all know that God doesn't respond to formulaic faiths.  After all, he's neither a vending machine nor a tame lion. 

As I got more involved, and as I actually tried fasting and found out how difficult it is, I began to revise my opinion.  Certainly, fasting can be reduced to a formula, but really and sincerely humbling, depriving, and mortifying oneself is tough.  Self doesn't like self-mortification.  Self would prefer to think that everything is fine.  Fasting gets self where it hurts: it shows self how weak and self-centered it really is. 

I have far too many reflections to put into one blog, but I thought it would be appropriate to spend Lent thinking about fasting.  So for the next five weeks, I'm going to focus on some aspect of this spiritual discipline:  Purpose, Practice, Pitfalls, Payoff, and Post-fasting changes to one's life.  It won't be boring, and I would love to hear about your own experiences with fasting. 

In preparation for Lent: Salmon Pizza

Here at the Atsma household, we have a tradition of homemade pizza every week, on Sundays during the football season and on Fridays during the rest of the year.  Our policy is to make the pizza from whatever we happen to have in the house, but I usually make sure that we have pepperoni, mozarella cheese, and tomato sauce in the house so our options are open. 

The following recipe, however, has none of the above.  We threw it together last week to use the last remains of a salmon filet.  I now post it for all my Catholic friends in Bremerton who are about to start fasting for Lent. (Fish is still allowed, right?)

 

Crust:

Use on whatever crust suits you. I use Nigella Lawson’s pizza caesarea recipe:

• 1 2/3 cups cake flour (I use whole wheat and it works fine.)
• 1 heaping tsp. yeast
• .5 tsp. salt
• approximately 1/2 cup + 2 Tbls. warm water
• 2 Tbls. extra virgin olive oil

Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Stir in the water and the olive oil, adding as much water as necessary to form a dough. "When you've got a shaggy mess that's on its way to being a dough" (I love Ms. Lawson's cookbooks), dump it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it for about 5 minutes. Let it rise for an hour in a lightly oiled bowl covered in plastic wrap.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees (I've used 450 with no ill effect). Nigella prescribes flattening the dough by hand, but I roll the crust thin and cut down the cook time by five minutes (15 minutes for the crust and sauce + 10 minutes with all toppings). I also coat the pizza pan with olive oil and sprinkle rosemary and parsley on it. Just a habit of mine.

Sauce: 

• 1.5 – 2 cups white sauce (butter/ olive oil sautéed with flour, add milk and thicken)
• 3 tablespoons prepared mustard 
• .25 cups mayonnaise
• .5 tsp. lemon juice 
• 2 Tbsp rosemary
• 1 Tbsp dried parsley 
• Salt and pepper to taste

Prepare the white sauce until it reaches canned mushroom soup consistency.  Add the mustard, mayonnaise, and lemon juice and stir until the sauce is uniformly yellow.  Then add the herbs and spices, turn to low heat, and let sit until the crust is ready.  Spread the sauce over the crust, and put the pizza as is in the oven for 15 minutes (as mentioned above).

 

Toppings:

• 1 cup cooked salmon, shredded 
• 1 cup mushroom pieces 
• 1.5 cups fresh spinach, chopped (We put spinach on almost all of our pizzas.)
• 2+ cups  grated monterrey jack cheese

Take the pizza out of the oven.  Sprinkle the toppings over the sauce in the order given, making sure that the cheese covers everything else liberally.  Put the pizza back in the over and bake for another ten minutes.  Cool the pizza for about five minutes.  Serve with a salad or something dark and green.  We drink milk with dinner, but with the cream sauce and all the cheese, it's almost overkill.  

Crying Foul.

The sun is out, and even though we’ve only just crested from January into February, it feels like spring outside. The air is warm enough to shiver through a walk with just a sweater. The shadows aren’t too cold to stand in while the dog sniffs absently at whatever he smells. The little birds are chirping animatedly from the underbrush. And a thick floral scent from some of the earliest flowers hangs in the air and reminds me of honeysuckle. It’s not honeysuckle -- it’s not a vine, and the flowers are small, white, and practically petalless – but it smells like honeysuckle, and it’s blooming between the apartment buildings where we walk.

The other day, I was reading an essay by G.K. Chesterton: “In Praise of Grey,” or maybe it was “In Defense of Grey.” In it he talks about weather, and how English people should not complain about their weather because they are the only people in the world who have true weather. (I cry foul on that. Chesterton had obviously never visited the west coast of America, where he would have found weather remarkably like his own.) He says that people should never sneer at grey weather because grey is the most various and obliging kind of weather. It can be soft like cashmere or threatening like judgment. It brings out the bright colors in one’s surroundings and lets them speak for themselves. Furthermore grey represents a state of doubt or hope: hope that something else might be coming in a little while.

I sympathize with Mr. Chesterton. I can enjoy a grey day and appreciate the difference between puffy clouds, rain clouds, thunderclouds, and hanging mist. I know how to look at the skies and wish that the clouds would give way to an invigorating rain or wander through our local park and feel that faint fairy chill that a low lying fog brings in. But I respectfully submit that when a person feels hope on a grey day, the supreme hope is for a day like this. Dwellers of cloudy climes may find grey friendly, familiar, and even interesting, but when we hope, we hope for sun, except for the odd occasions that we hope for snow.

Grey can be glorious. Clouds add character to any skyscape. A pure blue sky, especially in a flat landscape, can be overwhelming, but add a few big, puffy clouds, and the whole things becomes playful, like the heavens decided to go sailing. Add some charcoal overtones to those clouds, and the sky becomes dramatic with a touch of impending downpour and a sense that something big might happen. Every sunset or sunrise is better for having clouds around it. They bring out more color and give the color more surfaces to play on. Even a solid grey sky can be exciting if there is some variety or energy in the clouds.

But grey is ultimately limiting. Every parent has had or will have to explain to a child that the sun doesn’t really go away when the clouds come out. It just hides behind them. The clouds cover it up. Clouds come between us and the sun, between us and the blue expanse above us, and if they stay around long enough, we begin to forget that it’s there. Sure, we know that if we got in an airplane (I almost wrote aeroplane, that’s how enmeshed in Chesterton I am at the moment), we could go above the clouds and see the vast blue sky and the rays of the sun, even more brilliant for being above the smoke and the dust held in by the clouds. However, our daily practical consciousnesses forget that the blue exists. The spectrum of our sight adjusts to focus that much closer to the ground. It’s like we’ve had eternity cut off from us in a physical way. We forget to think in terms of the whole when the half is pressing in on us.

That’s why a clear blue day like today is so invigorating to people who live in cloudy climates like ours. A clear day and a big blue sky are a revelation in a very real, physical way. The world comes back into perspective, and we remember the sublime sense that we are very small creatures in a big, beautiful world. The sky is big and deep, and it’s not empty either. It’s blue and vast and full of who knows what. Grey may make the individual object, the brilliant leaf or the immediate building, stand out more, but blue brings them all together in the vast consciousness that there is one great sky and we are all beneath it. On a day like today, I feel like I can see the whole world if I just get high enough or walk far enough, and moreover, if I could see it, I could understand it all somehow. That’s the power of, ahem, illumination.