Intermittent fasting? Try the 5th century playbook

Lent is upon us – those 40 days of voluntary masochism that we moderns have mercifully put behind us. Or have we?

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A wine glass of water sits on an empty clean plate.

Daylight fasting.

Jean Fortunet, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Fasting, at least in the health world, is no longer a derogatory term but one in vogue. Particularly the merits of the restricted diet, in which you limit the amount of time you eat either to a day (e.g. to an eight-hour window) or a week (e.g. skip eating on two different days). The latter approach, maybe surprisingly, follows in the footsteps of our religious forebears, who fasted every Wednesday and Friday. Could it be that they’d figured out a practice we are just discovering? And what else were they trying to achieve?

To a medieval peasant in Britain, Lent ratcheted up the twice-weekly fast. It was 40 days of a vegan diet, that often increased in intensity as the body adjusted (though the pregnant, young, sick and old were exempt). Lent also issued in much cultural creativity. Who knew that Cathedral at Rouen was a Lenten by-product, as those desperate for butter could get a dispensation by contributing financially to the Butter Towers (as they became known)? And Britons may have Lent to thank for both black peas, a Lancastrian delicacy, and fish & chips, as cooks were challenged to keep Lenten menus interesting.

Despite our caricatures of Lent as a dour and draconian time, it was essential to the enjoyment of medieval life. The purpose of Lent was not the denial but the renewal of pleasure. Maybe it’s precisely that aspect that has echoed through the centuries, manifesting now in our punishing diets, Tough Mudder races, and endurance stunts. Isn’t that a bit part of why we (well, some of us) do them?

This article was first published on March 15 2023.

'One of the principal rhythms of medieval life was this move from feasting to fasting to feasting again.'

Our modern fascination with fasting can also receive wisdom from Lent, which is that fasting for its own sake will always lead to something unhealthy. It must be for the purpose of something greater. Our forebears worried that physical practices could become idolatry, when wrenched out of their context of repentance. As G. K. Chesterton remarked,

'Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped.'

The Old Testament prophets were particularly grumpy about this, insisting that fasting would do no good if it did not also help you love your neighbour more. Or as the early third-century Christians who fled from Roman excess into the deserts remarked,

'If you fast regularly, do not be inflated with pride; if you think highly of yourself because of it, then you had better eat meat.'

Fasting on its own will not make us better people, though we might shed a few pounds. Fasting is to restore the pleasure not only to eating, but also to the soul in need of God. Interesting that one of the primary biblical metaphors for a lively spiritual life is that of feasting and eating. Fasting resets the soul with repentance. It is praying with our body. It is not a negation but a purgation of desire – not denying our desires but resetting them. C.S. Lewis wondered whether our desires are not too strong, but too weak.

'We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.'

So if you’ve considered intermittent fasting, or even if not but you feel you might need a more balanced perspective on pleasure, consider the Lenten playbook. Feast and fast cyclically. Do it for a greater purpose than just losing weight. Let it change and reset your true desires. And maybe, just maybe, you might discover God waiting for you at the root of all your desires.

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Sustainability

13 September 2024

7 min read

Living sustainably doesn’t have to be a burden, here’s the case for action

How not to get hot and bothered about climate change.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A protester holds up a green sign reading: 'It's hard to be green. Kermit'.

Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

The fundamental tenets of Christianity show why Christians are called to love not just one another but all created things.

1. God is love.

2. God created everything.

Therefore, God loves everything he created.

3. God appointed humanity as the guardians of creation.

Therefore, a fundamental part of our identity and calling as human beings is to protect and sustain all that God created.

This lies at the basis of everything Christians believe and do. But a case can be made that is more basic still because it appeals, not to anything distinctively Christian, but to natural human wisdom. The climate crisis is not a Christian crisis. It’s a crisis for everyone who cares about their future and that of our planet. The climate crisis may be something unprecedented in the history of humanity, but the principles that are needed to resolve it are not new at all. Sustainability is not a new or particularly abstruse idea. It is something everyone understands as basic common sense. If I cut down trees faster than they can grow, I won’t be able to do that forever. One day I will cut down the last tree and then there won’t be any more trees, ever again. If I catch fish faster than they can reproduce, then one day I will catch the last fish and then won’t be able to catch any more ever again.

But it’s not only about foresters and fishermen. Since the dawn of humanity, we have been living sustainably – wisely preserving resources and using only what we can replace, so that we and our descendants can continue to live. This applies to everyone regardless of their profession. All of us, if we spend more money than we earn, are living in a way that cannot last for long. If we use resources at a faster rate than we can replenish them, we will run into trouble at some point in the future. Every person possessed of reason and common sense knows this intuitively without having to be taught it. Only someone seriously deluded, foolish, or with some kind of mental health problem fails to understand the need for sustainability in order to have any kind of future at all, let alone a pleasant future.

The call to live sustainably can lead us to feel burdened by a permanent sense of guilt, a feeling that we ought to be doing more than we are...

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We are burning fossil fuels at hundreds of times the rate they can be produced. We are producing plastics that cannot be recycled, meaning we have to dump them in landfills that are growing all the time. We are pouring carbon dioxide into the air faster than anyone can take it out. All of these things mean that there is a time limit on the kind of lifestyles we are all leading now. If we carry on in this way, then one day we will cross a line from which there is no returning. As Mark Scarlata has pointed out, the solution cannot be technological. Even if we find a way to balance carbon outputs with inputs, we are only kicking the can further down the road. Our inability to live within our means will simply resurface somewhere else later on. The problem is spiritual, not technical.

Everyone understands this at some level even if it’s the kind of truth from which we prefer to avert our eyes. The harder problem is to understand why this basic common sense isn’t proving effective. Why are we living collectively in a way that only a foolish or insane person would live, when most of us taken by ourselves are neither foolish or insane?

The problem, at least in part, is that we are all entangled in systems that make it very hard for us to live sustainably. If I am an ordinary Brit living in an ordinary town or city, and I need to buy toothbrushes or nappies or cucumbers or strawberries, I go to the local supermarket: and the only options available are made of plastic or wrapped in plastic that will not decompose for 500 years, and often brought here from the other side of the world using huge amounts of carbon emissions. Most of us are busy people with limited financial resources. We don’t have the time to find sustainable alternatives and often they are too expensive even if we can find them. The societal structures that we live in limit the choices we have. The call to live sustainably can lead us to feel burdened by a permanent sense of guilt, a feeling that we ought to be doing more than we are, but also an inability to see how we could be doing more given all the pressures, needs and constraints on our time and money.

Christians do not naively believe that God will sweep in and fix everything if we just wait. That would be to deny our responsibility, and it is not what hope means.

We are all culprits in part, since we all contribute to non-sustainable living. But we are also partly victims of forces beyond our control, large cultural forces that shape and determine our actions more than we can imagine. We have very little power over those structural forces and currently things do not look good. Common sense principles aren’t working. The climate crisis is only getting worse. So, what do we do?

It is at this point that Christianity has something special to offer to the problem.

First, Christians are never called to be defeatist or to throw in the towel. This is because we are called to an enormous hope, a hope that surpasses understanding, a hope that the world cannot understand because it stands over against all the odds and all the possibilities. This hope is rooted in the conviction that our God is God Almighty, that he has not abandoned his creation, and that he has power to save. He is a saviour. He is the God of our salvation. This is the God we believe in. The climate crisis may look bleak right now, but Christians need never despair or become indifferent. If we do our small part, we can trust that God is in control of what is out of our control.

Secondly, Christians believe that every human being is a free agent with the capacity to choose how he or she will act. Our freedom may be limited by the societal structures that shape and constrain our choices, but it is not destroyed. We can still make choices within those limits to buy and live more sustainably – anything from choosing a holiday destination within driving distance, to giving up beef (by far the worst food for carbon emissions). There is something all of us can do.

Thirdly, Christians believe in a God who transforms hearts and lives, winning them to the power of the gospel and to a new way of living that is free of the shackles that this world – the structures of society – puts on us. This transformation is slow – slower than we would like it to be sometimes. We feel the shackles still gripping us at times. We are not expected to change everything all at once, to become holy overnight. Nevertheless, God gives us the power to change our lives, and to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The way towards sustainable living is not to try to change everything at once, but to ask: what one thing can I change in my daily lifestyle that would make it more sustainable? And then once we’ve mastered that and integrated it so we no longer even think about it and it’s just a default, then we can ask: what’s the next thing I can do? All of a sudden what looks like an unimaginable height of transformation, when it is broken down, becomes a series of manageable steps.

Even if we do everything in our power, we cannot by ourselves avert a possible catastrophe. We are small players in a big game. Christians do not naively believe that God will sweep in and fix everything if we just wait. That would be to deny our responsibility, and it is not what hope means. Hope means the opposite: that we continue to fight to avert climate disaster even when it seems hopeless. Christians are called to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We are called to live in such a way that, if catastrophe comes, it won’t be because of us – to live in hope that our actions are meaningful and worthwhile and that we are in the hands of a God who is far more powerful than the most powerful forces in this world.