American Christians have lost the art of fasting. It’s simply not practiced in most of our churches. This is strange in the context of our heritage. Fasting has been a staple of Christian spirituality for thousands of years. Where did it go? More importantly, what are we missing?
In our current culture of chaos and numbing, doom-scrolling and self-medicating, recovering the practice of fasting may be what we need to stay sane and whole and spiritually alive.
Before I advocate for this practice, it’s important to say that fasting is not for everyone. There are lots of reasons why fasting not be right for you right now. For example, you might have mental or physical health concerns, or dietary or medical needs that mean you shouldn’t miss a meal. For some of us, our bodies need no reminders of the chaos in the world.
But most of us haven’t abandoned fasting for any good reason. We’ve just never done it. This is a shame because fasting is a powerful spiritual practice. For those of us who instinctively minimize our feelings or feel numb to the suffering and injustice in the world, fasting might be the perfect prescription. Here are 3 ways that fasting can help you grow.
Fasting as Unnumbing
Fasting is a kind of protest against our feelings of ease and normalcy. Things are not okay, and it’s right and good for us to feel unease about reality.
I’ve mentioned in other articles MIGRANT MINDSET that Christian health could be called “spiritual realism.” This idea comes from a theologian named Richard Lovelace. His point was that health in Christian life isn’t about imagining things to be true. It’s about realizing (making real to ourselves) the things that are true. We don’t pretend God loves us; we meditate on the beautiful fact that He does. We don’t imagine being fearless; we recognize that Jesus is Lord and let confidence in God drive away our fears. You see the difference?
Fasting is a way we make real to ourselves what is really true: things are not as they should be. The world is full of pain and its people suffer. It’s a way of bringing our bodies in line with the truth that things are not as they should be. Fasting creates an ache inside of us that harmonizes with the broken world. It brings reality into our very being. So that’s the first reason to fast: it can strip away the varnish we paint over the world’s problems and help us feel what is really true.
Fasting is a way of choosing wakefulness to reality.
Fasting as Joining
In the context of human history, American Christians are extremely comfortable. There are a whole host of uncertainties and vulnerabilities from which we are protected by virtue of our location and socioeconomic status.
In other words, the majority of humans are dealing with troubles and fears from which we are protected, insulated. Our protection from these concerns isn’t itself wrong; it’s a great good. It’s good to have enough food and medicine. But the danger is that by being insulated we become calloused, numb.
Fasting is a small but tangible way that we can protect against the numbing effects of distance and protection. And here’s the important point: by awakening ourselves to hunger and discomfort, we join the suffering.
There are, of course, other ways of creating solidarity with the suffering. We can educate ourselves through listening to their stories, work with the hurting to improve our systems and bring healing, and physically travel beyond our geographical spheres of comfort to see the concerns of others, to name just a few. Fasting is one more tool for joining. It’s a way of weeping with those who weep. Or, maybe even more fundamentally, it’s a way of proclaiming to ourselves that the tears of the weeping matter.
Solidarity should have a special appeal to Christians, who, in Christ, are made into a family that covers the globe. Our brothers and sisters are hurting in ways we have mostly lacked the strength or determination to imagine. Fasting is a way of joining them, if only in our hearts. It’s a way of saying “I may not know you, but I care for you, and I refuse to be numb to your pain.” Every hunger pang is a reminder: somewhere, a sister or brother is aching for help. Spiritual realism again: we fast not to pretend we’re suffering, but to remember those who are.
That leads to the last point.
Hunger’s Holy Work
There’s a reason “prayer and fasting” go together in our minds. When fasting awakens us to the pain in the world and brings our hearts in harmony with the world’s aches, it naturally fuels both our prayers and our actions. The hunger in our bodies moves us toward intercession and justice – two essential ways we participate in God’s work of healing.
As Richard Foster has said, what keeps us from praying is usually not a lack of faith, but a lack of compassion. When fasting breaks open our hearts to genuine compassion, we find ourselves drawn deeper into both prayer and action. Our prayers become more urgent and authentic; our hands become more ready to serve.
This shouldn’t surprise us. Throughout scripture, true fasting is consistently linked with both fervent prayer and works of justice. The prophet Isaiah famously challenged empty ritual fasting, calling for a true fast that would both cry out to God and “loose the chains of injustice.” When we fast with open hearts, we find our hunger leading us to both intensive intercession and concrete action – to protest unjust systems, to advocate for the vulnerable, to give more generously, to move beyond our comfort zones into spaces where we can make a tangible difference.
In the words of Walter Brueggemann: “Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal”
The ache in our bodies becomes a kind of compass, pointing us toward places where healing is needed and empowering us to respond with prayer and presence and action. This is perhaps one of fasting’s greatest gifts—it not only awakens us to the world’s pain but propels us into the full work of mending it, through both our prayers and our actions.