I wonder how many people in Dunedin are fasting in any way for Lent (the 40 days before Easter) this year. If they are, I bet Facebook fasts are the most common form. In my childhood, we were encouraged to "give up something for Lent". For me, chocolate or biscuits seemed good choices because I loved them just a bit too much. I was in my 20s before I realised that "giving up something for Lent" was a form of fasting.
Loving something a little bit too much — the issue that arose for me every year in Lent as a child — lies at the heart of technology fasts these days. People are fasting from Facebook for a week, a month, or the 40 days of Lent, or setting aside their phones for an hour, a half-day or even a weekend.
Another common form of fasting today is the 40-Hour Famine, practised by high schools and church youth groups, where participants eat nothing (or reduce their food) for 40 hours to experience solidarity with the poor. The "Live Below the Line" project, where participants feed themselves for a week on a very small sum of money, is another contemporary form of fasting.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, fasting has always involved inner transformation as well as deeper connection with God. For Jews, the Day of Atonement was, and continues to be, a day of fasting to repent for sins. In the Hebrew scriptures, David fasted both when he mourned and when he asked God to answer prayer. Ezra, Esther and Daniel also fasted as a part of prayer. In Jesus’ time, Jews fasted two days a week, and Jesus appears to have assumed his followers would continue to fast with some consistency.
"When you fast," Jesus says in Matthew 6:17. The New Testament provides two instances of the early Christians fasting, and one of them seems to indicate fasting was a normal part of the Christian life: "While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting," Acts 13:2 reads. In that story, while they were worshipping and fasting, the Holy Spirit told them to set apart Paul and Barnabas for ministry to the non-Jewish Roman world. Receiving guidance from God while fasting continued to be a theme for much of Christian history.
Helping the poor through fasting was another fasting theme of the early church. Sometime around AD 128, the philosopher Aristides explained to Emperor Hadrian the way Christians lived: "When someone is poor among them who has need of help, they fast for two or three days, and they have the custom of sending him the food which they had prepared for themselves."
For more than 18 centuries, all the fasting perspectives I’ve mentioned continued to play a significant role for Christians. Fasting was viewed as a way to empower prayer, repent for sin, ask for guidance, make space to hear God speak, and save money to help the poor. However, in Western countries, fasting fell almost entirely out of favour among Christians between 100 and 150 years ago.
Recently fasting has come back into view for many reasons. We have more relationships with Christians in Asia, Africa and South America, where Christians never stopped fasting. Mother Teresa advocated fasting as a way to free up money to give to the poor. We now encounter more people of other religions who practise fasting. The tyranny of many aspects of contemporary life, especially technology, has motivated people to see the benefits of fasting.
Fasting almost always creates surprises in the form of unexpected guidance from God, insights about daily life in a consumer society, and intimacy with our fasting partners. I encourage you to try a fast from Facebook, a favourite food item, or something else for a finite period of time. I can guarantee you’ll be surprised by something.
- Lynne Baab is senior lecturer in pastoral theology at the University of Otago. She is the author of Fasting: Spiritual Freedom Beyond our Appetites and blogs at www.lynnebaab.com.
