As I hope you realize, there is a lot about these Christian spiritual disciplines that that simply cannot be included on Sunday. My goal is only to make introductions, a bit like connecting people who do not know one another but I suspect would benefit from doing so. I trust God to grow the “relationships” that emerge, and I hope to be present and available to companion those who wish to go beyond an introduction to a deeper kind of knowing and practice.
While organizing my notes from this past week to prepare better for this coming one, I was struck by a quotation that highlighted something about fasting that I am unsure whether I sufficiently emphasized. The speaker is Nathan Foster, son of “Celebration of Discipline” author Richard Foster, who is an author, podcaster on the spiritual life, and an altogether worthwhile person to know of. In discussing the discipline of fasting, he said:
“We really can’t see things until we’re out of it… I don’t know how much reading the news is impacting me until I take a break from it… With fasting, I learn about ways that things are destructive that I didn’t know… I couldn’t see… because I was in it.”
Many of us have heard (or even repeated ourselves) the adage “you don’t know what you have until it is gone.” There is indeed something of absence that makes presence more vivid, and this applies not only to love and life but also to harm and pain.
I remember after a particularly unhappy transition out of a difficult place in my own life, a trusted friend asked me how I was doing. I thought a minute, trying to respond honestly instead of by rote. And then I said: “I’m doing well, actually. It’s like I had been holding my breath for a long time and I didn’t even know it. Now I can breathe.” It wasn’t until I stepped outside of that situation that I could even see that about myself and my body, despite knowing it was harmful in other ways.
Through fasting — and here I am speaking perhaps more of non-food fasting — we are able with God to step out of things long enough to see (with God’s help) what they do to us — for good or for ill.
Let me know if you’d like to explore fasting or any of the other disciplines further with me, or to connect about anything else on your mind.
Remember, we’re all in this together,
Pastor Michael