Hidden Strength

Lenten Vespers, Week One: Fasting

Reading: Luke 5:27-35

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Last summer a group of us here at St Peter’s read through the Didache together, and I think it was an enriching experience for us all. I know I certainly enjoyed it. The Didache is one of the oldest Church documents that we have: a catechism for new Christians entering the community in the first century A.D.

One of the things that surprised some of us was the early Church’s emphasis on fasting, not simply in certain seasons but every week of the year. Wednesdays and Fridays were always fast days for the earliest of Christians. And yet few things could be further removed from our experience as middle-class twenty-first century Americans. Why, we wonder, would anybody want to fast?

This tradition is of course not unique to Christianity. Hindus fast. Buddhists fast. Native Americans and Taoists and Muslims fast. And we ourselves inherited the discipline from our Jewish forebears. It comes up quite often in the Bible. Fasting—which is to say, restraining our appetites and abstaining from certain foods or practices for a time—appears universally recognized for its spiritual value.

But why is this? Is it really important to Jesus whether we eat red meat or fish, whether we skip a meal or two during the day? To answer this, I think we have to understand how the world of the Bible viewed the human soul. In the ancient world, both East and West, the soul was understood to have certain divisions, namely: the intellect, the will, and the passions.

The passions are the parts of you that govern survival. They are the appetites, not just for food and drink but for power, for territory, for sex, for revenge. The fight-or-flight response is a passion, a survival mechanism. And passions are good things, in and of themselves. They keep us alive. They keep us healthy. But only when restrained within their proper bounds. They have their place: thus far and no farther. If we let them run amok, we become werewolves.

The intellect, in contrast, is your reason, the better angels of your nature. Here is the seat of ethics, morality, and logic. Everything that elevates you over other animals—transcendence, abstraction, art, science, spirituality—that’s your intellect. If the passions are bestial, the intellect is angelic. It’s yin and yang, Jekyll and Hyde, order and chaos, and we are made up properly of both, fashioned from earth in the image of God. And the balance between the two is governed by your will.

The will is the part of you that chooses. We’ve all heard the apocryphal Cherokee story that each man has within him two warring wolves, one malevolent, the other benevolent, and the wolf that wins in the wolf you feed.  Well, the will is the part of you doing the feeding, mediating and governing the two.

In a well-ordered soul—which is to say, in a healthy person’s mind—the intellect guides the will, which in turn governs the passions. In other words, we reason out, as best we can, what is right; we then choose to follow and to do what is right; and consequently we channel our passions, our appetites, appropriately. That’s a healthy person. That’s a balanced soul.

A disordered soul, by contrast, flips all that on its head. In a disordered person, a disordered mind, it’s the passions that run amok, desiring, taking, seizing, using. Our appetites override our will, leading us to choose only what is beastly and selfish and base. The reptile brain takes over, grasping, gnawing, clawing, biting.

And the intellect, rather than being allowed to seek the enlightenment of reason, is instead hijacked for the purposes of rationalization—making excuses for the terrible things we do in order to take what we want and use who we will. That’s a broken person. That’s a soul who has already one foot deep in hell.

Now, you may think that these are outdated ideas, that we no longer speak of the soul as being made up of intellect, will, and passions. But the truth is that we still embrace and believe this same model of the makeup of the human mind, only we give it different labels. We call the will ego; the passions we call id; and the intellect, the superego. And we now term the whole thing psychology. But we are still today who we were back then.

When you want a healthy, balanced body, you exercise. You lift little weights so that when it counts you can lift heavy weights. You run short distances so that in time you might run marathons. The same holds true for the soul. You need a strong will to maintain the balance. You need discipline enough to free the intellect and restrain the passions, in the same way that a chariot driver guides and restrains the horses that pull her along. And the way you do that is fasting.

Fasting is the athletic dimension of spirituality. It means restraining our passions in small things so that we are strong enough to restrain them when it really counts. And in restraining our passions—putting limits upon our appetites—we thus free our intellect to explore beauty and truth and goodness and things that transcend merely what we can see and hear and touch. It takes willpower to read a book. It takes willpower to pray, or to paint, or to do anything that’s actually worthwhile.

Look, honestly, Jesus doesn’t care what you do or don’t eat. He flat-out says that it’s not what goes into the body that defiles, but what comes out of your heart. He’s going to love you no matter what. This isn’t about earning divine favor. That’s not what any of this is about—not fasting, not Lent, not Christianity. The love of God is poured out freely and superabundantly in Christ Jesus upon the Church, upon humanity, upon the whole of Creation. And nothing you do will change that.

Rather, the practice of fasting, the practice of restraint, is intended to keep our souls strong and healthy and free throughout the arduous journey of this life. I know it goes against everything our culture tells us—indulge! splurge! consume! possess!—but in restraining ourselves, strengthening ourselves, we are better enabled to love and to serve our neighbor in his need.

That is the freedom of a Christian.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.