Line upon Line

I’m hungry. Starving maybe, I mutter to an empty kitchen.

It’s been twenty hours since I ate last. My belly tells me that a decent person wouldn’t punish it this way. Food is still four hours away, according to the Mormon custom of a full day’s fast. This state seems biologically perverse to me. Something is clearly wrong here.

But I’m fasting. So I wait.

That name, “fasting,” has always struck me as outrageous because few simple things so easily disrupt the normal flow of life as failing to eat. Especially when I’m out of practice, each hour drags me forward by the pit of my stomach. It’s not the slow tempo of dread. In my heart, I know that I won’t starve to death or contract a fatal disease of malnutrition. But time moves at a tortuous pace: I’m no good at being quiet.

Hungry and restless, my mind wonders why I’m doing this to myself all over again. This quiet is painful. I have the same problem with prayer. My soul can’t sit still. It’s like a 2-year-old boy trying to endure hours of church meetings with grownups. The quiet frightens me. It’s not natural.

When I was a young missionary, I thought fasting was a way to shout a prayer. If you wanted something too weighty to be secured by time on your knees, then you dialed the amplifier up to 11 by skipping two meals. Even the half-deaf God of the Psalms could surely hear such a shouted prayer. That strategy fit well with my lifelong fear of silence, and it contributed to my general exhaustion by the end of my mission. I was hell-bent on wearing myself out in the service of the Lord.

I’m less convinced now that God needs a hearing aid. I suspect that God hears perfectly well, whether we shout or whisper. Not that we shouldn’t pray with passion. Often, we must. But sometimes we will need to be quiet.

After my mission, I went through a phase where I thought of fasting as exclusively a mechanism to honor the poor. I was spiritually depleted. I only had the energy to see the material, practical implications of religion. I understood the day without food as a way to turn a sympathetic eye to the plight of the penniless. I donated to the food bank, paid a fast offering, and tried to keep the hungry in mind. Fasting was a way to walk in a hungry person’s moccasins for the proverbial mile. Short of actually becoming poor, fasting seemed like an efficient way to commiserate with those who are “an hungred” (Matthew 25:35). I still believe it is, believe that fact with my whole Mormon soul. There’s just more to it than that.

The fast is not simply a story about the human toll of poverty, however important that story is. The fast is also a story about noisy excess. We moderns have created a promised land full of curdled milk and spoiled honey. We stood with Moses in front of the bush that was aflame but not consumed. With the ancients, we heard Jehovah promise that the righteous would find “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:17). And in place of that Promised Land, we have built a nutritional Tower of Babel. This modern temple on the Plain of Shinar (Genesis 11) is a cornucopia of loud, flavorless, anonymous food that swells our bellies. The ancients were so vulnerable to hunger that they sometimes saw God as a story about full bellies. We have built that longed-for Shangri-La ourselves, and it has left us achingly overweight and indigested. Our backs are breaking under the burden this modern cornucopia has imposed upon us. We are never hungry, but we are always uncomfortable. We are never quiet.

But we are called to be quiet. After they established the world we know, our heavenly parents and their newly human children rested. They observed the Sabbath. They let the world fall sacredly silent.

The pattern of Sabbath as cosmic quiet has begun to shape my aspirations for the fast. When I celebrate the Sabbath, I step outside the flow of secular time. I admit to myself and to others with the methodical sequence of Sundays that the succession of earthy moments is not all there is. I tell myself, my neighbors, and God that I know there’s more to the story than just atoms and energy flows, flesh and bones, minutes and hours. I seek also those pregnant moments in which I become open to divine vastness.

In fasting, I fashion in my body the same susceptibility to divinity that Sunday works on my calendar. The aching beauty of our mortality comes both from our fleeting weakness and the eternity within which it is staged. We cannot know ourselves and our magnificence if we stay always locked in the prison of flesh and bones. We step outside that prison on a Sabbath. On a Fast Sunday, we strive to leap beyond the flow of time and the crush of mortality. We are, however briefly, furloughed from the frenetic flow of energy through ecosystems and the battles of nature red in tooth and claw. We are, in a word, quiet. We become more than we seem to be.

In my experience of fasting as bodily Sabbath, I’ve discovered an unexpected kinship. In her wise and perceptive PhD dissertation, “Radical Food,” Kate Holbrook explored the fasting practices of Nation of Islam Muslims (the African American take on Islam that converted Malcolm X from his life of criminal dissipation). Those Black Muslims, many freed like Malcolm X from lives of anger and self-destruction in Jim Crow America, struggled constantly with the perception that they were mere beasts. Slavers had always called them animals, and so had the slavers’ heirs. These American Muslims thus ate only one meal a day in order to tell the world that they were free to resist their bestial appetites. They could choose not to eat food that was placed before them. Through fasting, these African American souls took back their humanity from those who doubted it. They proved that they were more than talking animals.

When I fast these days, I acknowledge that I too am more than an animal. I am also a human being who resists mere physicality. I hear people say, apparently sincerely, that we humans are just animals. That’s an odd thing to say, like a jet pilot saying that airplanes don’t actually fly or a writer pretending she is illiterate. In wondering whether we might merely be animals, we are exercising our distinction from those physical beings who have never pondered such existential questions. I can see how pretending that we’re talking animals could be a way to resist a certain strain of religious fundamentalism. Heaven knows I’ve struggled myself at times to comprehend some ultra-traditionalist positions. But I’m not ready to cut off my nose to spite my face. I don’t need to abandon humanity to win points in a fight with fundamentalists. Fasting opens up to my view the gorgeous paths that lead away from the modernist highway, littered with road kill, and into forests and mountains and hidden alpine lakes. Fasting leads me to the quiet places where sense can be made of that life we share at most partially with animals.

When I fast, I admit that I and the people I love are merely human and also more than human. We are, in a word, gods of flesh and bone. For us mortals, to be a god means to be present in both time and eternity, as physical beings who yearn and look beyond our physicalness. Being hungry means knowing that I don’t wholly belong here. There’s more to me than this body of meat and calcium. Uncomfortable through hunger with my all-too-mortal flesh and bones, I realize that we are all more than we seem to be. We bear the marks of eternity deep in those very bones. Like the ancient Hebrews that Jeremiah (31:33) saw so clearly, we have the divine presence inscribed inside us, like spiritual DNA. When we fast, quietly, we find ourselves a little better able to read that inscription.