Fasting as Fine-Tuning

For most of church history, fasting was not a fringe practice. It was a Wednesday and a Friday. It was Lent. It was the disciplines that ordinary people kept because their grandparents had kept them. We have, in two generations, mostly forgotten how to do it.

I am not interested in fasting as a weight-loss strategy or a productivity hack. Both of those framings miss the point. Fasting is fine-tuning. It is the practice of asking the body to step back, briefly, so the spirit can hear without interference.

A fork only works if its tines are clean. Food is not unclean — it is good, given to us as a gift — but the body that is constantly digesting is a body that is constantly busy. Busy bodies are not good listeners. Loose the bonds. Undo the heavy burdens. That is fasting language, and it is also tuning language.

In the class we spend the first week not fasting at all. We practice noticing what we eat, when, and why. We read the texts. The actual fasting — when we get to it — is shorter and gentler than people expect. The point is never the heroics. The point is the cleaner tine.

A few practical things worth saying out loud. We do not fast in ways that harm the body. We do not fast competitively. We do not announce fasts (Matthew 6 is firm about that). We break fasts on simple, living foods. And we always — always — break fasts at a table, with someone, in thanksgiving.

If this is a season for you, come and learn. There is more grace in this than the internet will tell you.