Celebration of Discipline: Fasting

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through Cel­e­bra­tion of Dis­ci­pline by Richard Fos­ter, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2019. The sched­ule is online.

I think two insights from this chap­ter are par­tic­u­lar­ly salient for today:

“Through­out Scrip­ture fast­ing refers to abstain­ing from food for spir­i­tu­al pur­pos­es. It stands in dis­tinc­tion to the hunger strike, the pur­pose of which is to gain polit­i­cal pow­er or attract atten­tion to a good cause. It is also dis­tinct from health diet­ing which stress­es absti­nence from food for phys­i­cal, not spir­i­tu­al, pur­pos­es.”

Richard Fos­ter, Cel­e­bra­tion of Dis­ci­pline, page 48

When­ev­er peo­ple tell me that they are fast­ing from social media I always feel puz­zled.

I like the con­cept, I just don’t like call­ing it fast­ing. Tak­ing a break from Insta­gram is just self-con­trol and does­n’t need a spe­cial label. Fast­ing is refrain­ing from some­thing that you need to sur­vive — it shows that God is more pre­cious to you than life. Cut­ting out Face­book does­n’t rise to that lev­el.

When we expand the word fast­ing to include any act of self-depri­va­tion, we prime our­selves to ignore actu­al fast­ing. “I don’t need to fast food. I fast social media.”

A lit­tle lat­er Fos­ter says

“Reg­u­lar or week­ly fast­ing has had such a pro­found effect in the lives of some that they have sought to find a Bib­li­cal com­mand for it, so that it may be urged upon all Chris­tians. The search is in vain. There sim­ply are no Bib­li­cal laws that com­mand reg­u­lar fast­ing. Our free­dom in the gospel, how­ev­er, does not mean license; it means oppor­tu­ni­ty. Since there are no laws to bind us, we are free to fast on any day.”

Richard Fos­ter, Cel­e­bra­tion of Dis­ci­pline, page 51

Read­ing these words again over 20 years after I first stum­bled upon them I real­ize how influ­en­tial they have been to me. If you skimmed over them while rac­ing through the chap­ter, I encour­age you to read over them again slow­ly. These words apply to far more than fast­ing.

Some additional thoughts:

The prac­ti­cal details in this chap­ter are sol­id gold. If you’ve nev­er fast­ed for at least three days, I encour­age you to fol­low Fos­ter’s advice on pages 56–60. Start with skip­ping two meals (a 24 hour fast), then after a few rep­e­ti­tions skip three meals (a 36 hour fast), and then once you feel ready plan to skip meals for three to sev­en days. Since the first three days are the hard­est, if you’re going to fast three days then you might as well do sev­er­al more unless you have a rea­son not to (pro­fes­sion­al oblig­a­tions, an ath­let­ic train­ing sched­ule, etc). After that, do what makes the most sense to you.

Also, don’t lie about your fast­ing. Young Chris­tians do this all the time because they believe that if any­one dis­cov­ers that they are fast­ing then it does­n’t count. That’s a mis­un­der­stand­ing. What Jesus for­bids is draw­ing atten­tion to your fast so that peo­ple admire you. Here are His words in the NIV:

“When you fast, do not look somber as the hyp­ocrites do, for they dis­fig­ure their faces to show oth­ers they are fast­ing. Tru­ly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvi­ous to oth­ers that you are fast­ing, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

Matthew 6:16–18

The point is to not draw atten­tion to what you are doing, and the sim­ple truth is that exces­sive eva­sions actu­al­ly wind up draw­ing more atten­tion to your fast­ing than a straight­for­ward acknowl­edge­ment. So if some­one asks you point blank if you are fast­ing, just say, “Yes.” Or if one of your friends asks, “Do you need me to buy your lunch for you? I’m hap­py to spot you.” Then tell them, “Oh, that’s all right. I’m not eat­ing lunch today. Thanks.”

Final­ly, if you strug­gle with an eat­ing dis­or­der then you prob­a­bly should not fast until you achieve a healthy rela­tion­ship with food. As a gen­er­al rule, spir­i­tu­al­iz­ing your dys­func­tions leads to bad out­comes.

Next week we look at the dis­ci­pline of study!