Balancing Feast and Fast

FEASTING IS JUST half the story. To have "Sunday dinner" implies plainer weekday meals. Holiday banquets include foods not seen the rest of the year. Feasting cannot truly be feasting if there is no contrast, no type of restraint on ordinary days to keep our bodies and our spirits in balance. The other side of feasting is fasting.

By fasting I mean both the year-round practice of eating simply, to remember and in some small way to mitigate others' hunger, and also the occasional (or regular) discipline of going without food entirely for a period of time - for one day a week or month, for Holy Week, or for clarification or purification before a significant event.

Our culture does not take self-denial, discomfort, or the discipline of fasting very seriously. Feeling hungry is for dieters, political or religious fanatics, or the poor. What were treasured gifts on special days for our forebears - meat, sweets, wine - have become daily fare for us. We want to eat what tastes good, what we like, what will keep the kids quiet. If we can afford it, why not? Subconsciously we have begun to think we are entitled to three meals a day, making it hard to feel gratitude for food or to consider giving up any portion of it.

I find fasting uncomfortable to think about because I love to cook, like to eat, and crave the camaraderie that happens around a full table. Fasting would seem to deny me all this. When fellow Sojourners Joyce Hollyday and Jim Wallis fasted 40 days during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the sight of them walking in the door each morning with their water Thermoses and juice bottles was enough to send me straight to the office kitchen for toast. The very idea of fasting made me instantly hungry, causing me to question food's role in my life.

Fortunately, a passage from the cookbook Extending the Table (by Joetta Handrich-Schlabach) has given me an angle from which I, as a feast lover, can approach fasting.

When affluence allows people to feast too frequently and independently of others, feasting loses much of its joy and integrity. It results in ill health and dulls our sensitivity to the needs of others. Reclaiming the feast may require learning to fast. Regularly abstaining from meat and other rich foods can be a spiritual act of solidarity. Reserving for special events foods we might easily afford, but that are luxury items in the world economy, unites us with those who have less.

This is not to deride the value of feasting. Indeed, Jesus is often shown at feasts in the gospels. Feasting was part of his parables that proclaimed the coming of the reign of God: the widow celebrating the discovery of her lost coin; the shepherd finding his lost sheep; the father welcoming home his prodigal son.

But the Bible also is clear about unacceptable feasting, such as Lazarus gorging while the poor man dies at his gate. And it is clear in its call for genuine, humble fasting, not as a pious gesture or as a grim act of will, but as an act of repentance, a seeking of God, a creating of extra space in our lives for spiritual reflection.

Our diet connects us to every aspect of existence - environment, economics, spirituality, mind, and body. What we eat should not harm ourselves, others, and - by extension - our God. Fasting, of one type or another, is a way to keep food in its proper perspective. Robert Farrar Capon, author of The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, has written:

We should be careful about allowing abundance to con us out of hunger. It is not only the best sauce; it is also the choicest daily reminder that the agony of the world is by no means over. As long as the passion goes on, we are called to share it as we can - especially if, by the mere luck of the draw, we have escaped the worst pains of it....Fast, therefore, until His Passion brings the world home free. He works through any crosses He can find. In a time of affluence, fasting may well be the simplest one of all.