How can we know what is real if we can no longer trust our senses?
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Fasting is how countless people from all over the world across many religions, show devotion of one kind or another. By disciplining themselves and attempting to gain mastery over their stomachs, they show a desire to serve God rather than their own instinctual desires.
“Fasting is a concrete way to prepare ourselves to receive the word of God. Abstaining from food is an ancient ascetic practice that is essential on the path of conversion” -Pope Leo XIV (Listening and Fasting)
Fasting by its very nature can teach us some things, as the current Holy Father, Pope Leo, says:
“Precisely because fasting involves the body, fasting makes it easier to recognize what we hunger for and what we deem necessary for our sustenance. Moreover, it helps us identify and order our “appetites,” keeping our hunger and thirst for justice alive and freeing us from complacency.” -Pope Leo XIV (Listening and Fasting)
When we are hungry, we imagine the foods we want more often than the most likely nutritious food item. For example, abstaining from meat on Fridays. If I'm hungry on a Friday and I know I can’t eat it, it becomes the only food I think about. By thinking about alternatives and choosing something else, I'm forced to consider the purpose of hunger to begin with. Then, by analogy, the purpose for my other desires. The purpose of hunger is to sustain your life, and the purpose of life is to get to heaven. Analogously, our hunger for truth is something we come to contemplate. Our hunger for justice is rarely satisfied in this life. This is important because, just like fasting frees us from complacency about our food choices, it can, by way of analogy, make us more keenly aware of our hunger for justice. We are oftentimes inclined to think that something isn’t serious if we are used to it. This is one of the major causes of safety program failures. Because we are inundated with so many safety training and regulations seminars (for those of us that in jobs that have these), we become complacent. We’ve heard it before, and the nuance is lost, and the risk persists. Complacency is an enemy of justice and reality. It gives us a false reality that conceals danger behind the false attitude of unearned wisdom.
Good VS Bad Fasting
One of the Holy Father’s predecessors, Pope St. Leo the Great(d. 461), speaks about what makes a fast good or bad in sermon 42. He says:
“Yet now all men’s minds should be moved with greater zeal to spiritual progress and animated by larger confidence, when the return of the day, on which we were redeemed, invites us to all the duties of godliness: that we may keep the super-excellent mystery of the Lord’s passion with bodies and hearts purified” -Pope St. Leo the Great
If we fast but fail to abandon our sinful habits, then what good was our fast? Who actually benefitted if not Our Lord nor us? In being scrupulous about fasting but failing to change our habits, are we not making the same mistakes as the Scribes and Pharisees? When we do this, we miss the forest for the trees of the moral life.
Our fasting should be like those who are ambitious for improvement in the spiritual life, analogous to an athlete who is ambitious for victory.
“Make your fasting a reality by amendment in your lives” -Pope St. Leo the Great
A classical school teacher with training in Thomistic philosophy and metaphysics. I am eager to share how philisophical insight can act as an aid to one's spiritual journey. Thomas Aquinas said it best when he called philosophy the handmaid of theology. The use of philosophical reasoning in our life brings with it a true sense of wonder at all that God has made.
