Fasting

Why am I so soft in the middle and the rest of my life is so hard?

“The life of the monk,” St. Benedict says in his Rule, “should be one continuous Lent.” Much as I admire the saint and his approach to monastic life, I can only hear him saying this while frostily pulling his cowl closer at the neck and tilting his chin slightly in the air. Nevertheless, he goes on, it’s good to have a season for remedying those areas of neglect that build up over the year.

Fasting is not Benedict’s particular focus, though of course he mentions some extra abstentions from meat and drink (with the Abbot’s permission and knowledge). But if there’s a characteristic devotion for Lent in our world, surely it’s fasting. And like any good high-church Protestant, I have envy and insecurity where fasting is concerned. It’s not that I consider the Reformation-era critiques of fasting as a legal requirement to be wrong, but that because of them we progressively lost sight of what fasting is and does. It’s there in the Scriptures, after all, just unproblematically popping up whenever Esther needs to save her people or Moses needs to meet God. The early Christian depictions of the baptismal candidates and liturgical leaders fasting along with the whole congregation before a baptism just jump off the page. Days of fasting and humiliation were still common in Puritan America. Intensifying prayers and sharpening oneself for the encounter with God is enduringly charismatic. The people who excel at fasting have, among other things, denied the world some of its power to bribe and cajole with comforts and ordinary delights.

So today one hears laments that fasting has decayed into laxity and eccentricity. Cardinal Dolan, not granting a dispensation for some event or other during Lent, points out that there are so few fast days left. I’ve heard lay Catholics scoff at the tiny window of fasting required before receiving the Sacrament. Some of us look with admiration at our Orthodox siblings who cut out eggs, cheese, and some oils for a longer pre-Easter fast than we do. It’s an easy thing to notice and talk about in a society both built for and dependent on constant consumption. Garrison Keillor wrote something once about how America is not a Christian nation because truly religious societies have fasts, whereas in America every day is a feast day.

All that is true, and it has shaped my understanding for as long as I’ve been observing Lent. I was a convert to fasting, in itself, before I was a convert to any particular religion. Ramadan was my gateway drug, but I dabbled in Yom Kippur and Lent long before I thought seriously about going to church. Most years, I work myself up to launching some ambitious course of devotion and self-denial and then watch it ebb away slowly as the weeks go by. This, of course, only proves how danged important and powerful fasting is.

But there is a shadow side to this particular exertion. Obviously eating disorders can make religious fasts a problem. It is possible to delude ourselves that we are gaining some kind of righteousness or strength of our own through fasting vigorously, or to blame ourselves excessively and treat lapses in fasting as if they are actual sins. And while fasting can help us get some distance from our compulsions, it can also open the door to temptations we don’t expect and that may find us vulnerable because of the effort we are putting into resisting some pleasant but licit enjoyment.

That’s how it felt, anyway, as I drove the five-year-old we’re fostering down to her partial hospitalization program on Ash Wednesday. I almost never eat breakfast outside of Saturday mornings but as we reached the home stretch to the hospital building, I became ravenous. I went straight to church, worked, celebrated the noon liturgy, and ran off to another hospital to impose ashes on a member (and, as it turned out, a half dozen staff on the same floor). I stopped for a vegan kale smoothie. I did my visits, picked up the kid, went back to church for the 6 p.m. liturgy, and went home. I was fine, I was virtuous, my modest fasting goals intact at least for this one day, which ought to be a gimme. Then I saw the peanut butter cups my wife had just bought me a day or two before, a big tall container of the good ones. I walked away, came back, ate one or two and walked away again. But, as I think one of Saul Bellow’s narrators put it, once the bill is broken the change is quickly spent. I hit those suckers with the inverted zeal of the new apostate.

Wouldst thou live chocoliciously?

I am too habituated to spiritual mediocrity at this point in my life to take these little failures hard. But I did ask myself: why couldn’t I get through a single day with a pretty basic, minimally inconvenient fast?

Eventually it dawned on me: the whole period since the new kid’s arrival had been a fast in various ways. I’d been fasting from sleep (of the thirty-odd nights she’d been with us by the beginning of Lent, she’d slept through perhaps three of them). I had been “fasting” from writing, turning down an extremely rare query from an editor and ceasing all pitching or even sketching out ideas as we sought to manage a daily program that took a whole lot of time (it took me several attempts to get this far in today’s newsletter). I had stopped chattering on Twitter, watching the Criterion Channel movies I’d really started enjoying, and reading anywhere but a child’s bedside. The single-mindedness of devotion I had always idealized and sought was real enough, it was just taking a form I couldn’t recognize or, indeed, get any feeling of satisfaction from.

The problem with this sort of fasting, theologically speaking, is that it sucks. I’d prefer a simpler life and a more normal sleep schedule with lots of writing and a better handle on my consumption of garbage foods. Devotions should be a free and joyful gift, not a grim accommodation. They should give us a nice warm, Jesusy feeling.

So I thought again that if every day in America is a feast day, every day is also, often in ways that are not all obvious or even visible, a fast day, too. People have to prune their lives back in many ways in order to meet some obligation, bear some burden, or answer some vocation. These sacrifices will never show up as “works of supererogation,” but that’s fine because works of supererogation are made up. They probably won’t even be coded, to the people doing them or to anyone around them, as acts of divine love and devotion. But the sacrifices are real, and demanding, and empty calories are a convenient and inexpensive way to compensate.

Then again, maybe what I’m describing is the theatrical run for which periods of fasting are the rehearsals. You don’t know when that inner stubbornness that fasting requires and cultivates will come in handy. Soft as I am, I can stand up to night after night of sleep interruption and I like to think that vindicates something. Just sit there and read a book or say some prayers until the little creature’s breathing evens out and you can slip away to your own bed.¹

Anyway, if you have good reason to need some slack right now, I hope you’ll give it to yourself. I appreciate Benedict’s wisdom on running your Lenten devotions past the abbot. “Presumption and vainglory” are a real spiritual danger. Their opposite, in the form of lacerating self-blame, can be an equally dangerous byproduct. Neither should be the result of a season of devotion. If you don’t have an abbot handy, it’s not the worst thing to err on the side of modest goals. But I especially appreciate that Benedict focuses on remedying negligence more generally. I don’t think Lent is a time to reach for ascetic heroism, punish ourselves, or scale any summits of virtue. But it’s a good time to recover our faith from a year’s entropy. It’s a good time to recognize how important our faith really is, or should be, to us. If your life is already a continuous Lent, the urgent task is to see it.

Appreciation: Paul Simon

Some brothers came to Abba Ben and asked him “During Lent, is it lawful to sing along with the last lines of ‘You Can Call Me Al’? Abba Ben answered them, “What are you doing, trying to make me into some kind of a jerk?”

During the winter of 1999-2000, I played guitar and sang at a lot of open mic nights in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. There was a little scene of amateur musicians who congealed at coffee shops and bars on their designated nights and we got to know each other and our repertoires fairly well. One night at Café Assisi, a couple of newcomers showed up. They were bouncy and cheerful, tanned and curly-haired post-collegiate types. They competently and joyously played ‘You Can Call Me Al.’ Just a couple of guys having fun with their guitars and a pop song from the 80s. It was disgusting. We were unemployable misfits who sang songs about heartbreak and addiction and here they had to stomp all over the vibe with their little upbeat radio hit.

It took me fifteen years and two to four children to give Paul Simon another chance. I’m sure I mellowed on the topic before this, but I can remember the moment I decided to really listen to him: his performance of “Still Crazy After All These Years” at the Saturday Night Live 40th anniversary show. The melancholic restraint was a genuine surprise in an event trading on warm familiarity and nostalgia. And as an example of songwriting craft it is just about perfect, starting with a slice-of-life verse about a chance meeting that only hints at the anhedonia ahead and progressing through a jaded rejection of love songs, an acknowledgement that death is going to make everything he might worry about fade away, a dissonant wobble of the arrangement, a soaring saxophone solo and a final verse that clarifies “still crazy” as anything but a denial of aging. “Is Paul Simon ok?” I found myself asking.

It’s not easy to tell a story of any kind in three verses and a bridge, and it’s still harder to make a story cohere while expanding thematically. “Old” isn’t one of his better songs but it does this pretty cleanly: I was young when these historical and pop-cultural things happened; religions are really old though; the universe is extremely old but God was there first. The theme starts out as tedious aging-boomer talk and gets subverted. It’s all gonna fade.

Or consider “Wristband,” which begins as a wisp of a gag—the singer is locked out of the stage door at his gig and can’t get back in because he lacks the required wristband—and spreads out:

The riots started slowly with the homeless and the lowly
Then they spread into the heartland towns that never get a wristband
Kids that can't afford the cool brand whose anger is a short-hand
For you'll never get a wristband and if you don't have a wristband
Then you can't get through the door

I’m tempted to call the central metaphor obvious, but it wasn’t obvious enough for someone else to do, and when I heard it for the first time on A Prairie Home Companion early in 2016 it gave me an uneasy feeling. Neither levity nor seriousness is played quite straight:

Have you all heard the news:
"Heaven finally found"?
Okay, it's six trillion light years away
But we're all gonna get there someday
Yes, we're all gonna get there one day
But, but not you.

If they’d ever laughed at themselves, this is the sort of thing Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen might have been able to write. It’s a register in which not everyone can sing or even really hear. There’s nothing wrong with aging into (or out of) music of course, but I wish I could offer those open-mic goofballs an apology on behalf of my overly serious, stony-faced twenty-year-old self. I had, after all, not bothered to listen to the lyrics floating over the bouncing chords. Three verses, each complete in itself, build through a mid-life crisis to a brief moment of transcendence.² The dissatisfactions and sorrows of soft middles and hard lives, short attention spans and long nights, role models vanishing down the alley of scandal and failure are all real enough. You can wallow in it or deny it if you want. But the best thing to do is to acknowledge it all and get over yourself enough to glimpse the angels in the architecture, the spinning infinity, and to respond with your own “Amen, alleluia.”

1. I did manage to read most of The White Album and the Olive Kitteredge sequel this way, though the later was picked up from the library by mistake in a sleep-deprived addle.

2. The official video is an abomination. If you didn’t live through the 1980s, you probably have to see it to believe it.