Posts Tagged ‘fasting’

The spirit of discipline.

{ November 26, 2008 @ 12:05 pm } · { personal reflection, spirituality }
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The list seems endless: prayer, meditation, fasting, journaling, “spiritual reading” (whatever that is), tithing, charitable acts.  Spiritual disciplines are so intimidating.  I googled “spiritual disciplines” and got 824,000 hits.  Just “prayer” got 88,700,000.  88 million people have written about prayer on the internet.  Each person has a different idea of what it means to pray, what it “does,” how it “works,” what the point of praying is.  You see, lately I’ve been realizing how hard it is to define what my own spiritual practices are.  For years, I’ve flowed in and out of certain habits.  Journaling is helpful sometimes, but usually after a month or so I tire of it or (more usually) tap out whatever guide I’m using and can’t quite get into the spirit of another one.  I never return to what I write, anyhow.  If I do reread my journals, I find myself wondering who the person was who wrote “that.”  It always feels unfamiliar, like stepping into the life of someone I know only from the news or TV.  The scene is familiar, but everything else seems foreign.  I love quiet, but sitting still isn’t my cup of tea unless I’m reading or on the computer, so meditation and prayer are a challenge.  For a long time, I’ve felt pretty heavy guilt about the irregularity and (might I say?) undisciplined nature of my spiritual practices.  Hit or miss, nothing like some of the people I admire so much who have doggedly pushed their way through the entirety of the Bible every year for decades or those who pray every morning.  Despite my admiration, I just can’t do that.  It simply isn’t who I am. 

But recently I’ve been trying to think about my own sense of spiritual practice differently.  I realized that the language we use about prayer and other disciplines is that of “fitness,” as though if we simply find the exercise that will “work” best in our own life and stick to it, our holiness muscles will be strong and toned, the solution to accessing God found through sheer sweat and self-will.  Discipline.  Well, I think there is certainly some very serious truth to this way of viewing spirituality… after all, if you don’t show up, it’s quite unlikely you’ll be doing very much listening to God, and practice does make perfection, after a fashion.  I remember, for example, a time when I really made a commitment to journal daily during Lent a few years ago.  The first weeks were painful.  I hated sitting there, attempting to speak to God and be silent so that God could speak to me.  But over that forty days, I became more able to wait patiently with my pen, not so sure of the truth of what I was saying, had a growing willingness to question my own assumptions about the things I was reading and thinking.  I felt guided.  A growing sense of peace about things I couldn’t control settled over me as I started to recognize patterns in my prayers and complaints.  But then, Lent ended and so did my commitment. 

So fitness might be a helpful metaphor… but I also think it limits how I think about what it means to live out my faith, using spiritual disciplines as a way to learn more about God and my relationship to God.  One of the 88 million websites (I confess, I didn’t keep track of which) said this, which I find enlightening:

“These disciplines can’t save you; they can’t even make you a holy person. But they can heighten your desire, awareness, and love of God by stripping down the barriers that you put up within yourself and some that others put up for you. What makes something a ‘spiritual discipline’ is that it takes a specific part of your way of life and turns it toward God. A spiritual discipline is, when practiced faithfully and regularly, a habit or regular pattern in your life that repeatedly brings you back to God and opens you up to what God is saying to you.”

Reading that, and thinking about what my spiritual life looks like right now, I realize that there are a number of wonderful things I’m a part of that absolutely “count” as spiritual disciplines, despite the fact that I don’t practice them daily and they aren’t on any “official” lists.  They are, yet and still, patterns in my life that do turn my heart and thoughts toward God and change the focus of the lens through which I view the world. 

  • Reading a variety of newspapers from around the globe
  • Putting myself in the presence of people who are deeply different from myself, either in opinion or experience
  • Noticing the beauty of the world, whether it’s in nature or the lives of other people
  • Taking joy in random moments, and not resisting my own spontaneous response to – a song on the radio, hearing a child laugh on the street, those times when a conversation with a friend is exactly the right thing at the right time
  • Spending time with people who have a deep connection with the holy or who have a generosity and openness of spirit
  • Writing this blog
  • Doing justice – making daily choices, as much as possible, with the well-being of other people across the world in mind, advocating for causes in line with my faith, living simply
  • Doing household chores.  This is one time when I really do pray.  God and I talk better when I’m doing dishes or making dinner or washing windows.  The physical activity seems to busy my mind in such a way that God can bypass all of the junk floating through my head the rest of the day. 

All of these things are ways I live my life.  They permeate my experience of the world and of God, and they help me listen more fully.  They aren’t an hour a day with my Bible.  They certainly do not make me holy and aren’t saving me on their own.  But each of them breaks down the barriers between myself and God and other people and God’s Creation.  They bring me back to God and remind me of all the mundane places where God is, all the daily things that in fact are sacred. 

I wonder, having read this, if you have anything similar in your own life?  One of the things I’ve found during my time in seminary is that we simply don’t talk about what our spiritual disciplines are – a vast majority of us (90% of Americans) say we pray, but what does that look like?  How do you practice spirituality?  What patterns turn you toward God?  How are you listening?

You shall love the stranger.

{ October 20, 2008 @ 9:46 pm } · { personal reflection, political, poverty, spirituality }
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“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” – Isaiah 58:6

“You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” – Deut. 10:19

 

Throughout history, diverse people of faith have participated in the spiritual discipline of fasting.  The intentional practice of limiting consumption, most often of food and drink, but sometimes also commercial products or personal habits, follows a long tradition: Moses fasted.  David fasted.  So did Jesus.  Indeed, Gandhi, 20th century suffragists, and political prisoners of many nations have fasted to bring attention to injustice.

 

The Bible recounts the practice of fasting throughout the Old and New Testaments, including for the purpose of averting God’s judgment, to focus the mind and heart on the will of God, and to prepare for times of trial or great spiritual challenge.  We know that our own country is in the midst of one of those times of challenge – we are faced with the fact that the American dream of equality, freedom, access to clean water, healthcare, and safe employment with living wages is far out of reach for many.  Like the Israelites, most of us, too, began as sojourners in this land.  Yet our immigrant brothers and sisters find little hospitality.  “You shall also love the stranger,” says the Lord. 

 

I’m a United Methodist, and our denomination has a special tradition of caring for the poor and of connecting such acts of mercy and justice to our spiritual practice.  John Wesley, the founder of our denomination, taught  that there are three simple rules for the life of faith: to do no harm, to do goodness, and to stay in love with God.  As Micah said: loving justice, doing kindness, walking humbly with our God. 

 

Beginning in the middle of October until the 2008 election, a collection of immigrants, movement leaders, day laborers, people of faith both lay and clergy, student leaders, grassroots organizers, musicians and artists, and people of conscience will rise out of fear and begin one of the largest hunger strikes in American history.  For the Christians participating in this intentional fast, we hope that our shared sacrifice and commitment to the Immigrant Rights Movement will bring attention to the ways in which our communities and government have neglected to provide reasonable care for the least, last, and lost of our society.  By joining the Fast for Our Future, whether for a meal, a day, or a week, we will repent of the personal and systemic choices we have made to oppress immigrants, following the rule to “do no harm.”  We will reflect during this time on better, more compassionate ways to love strangers in our midst, practicing acts of goodness.  We will witness to the power of the Living God amongst those without resources and without voices, sharing and experiencing the power of God’s love.  This is the fast that we choose. 

 

In fact, it’s the fast I’ve chosen.  You may have read my earlier post about poverty – as I was wondering what ways I could practically live out this sense of needing to make an intentional choice in my own life to do less harm, to do good, to undertake the eternal and difficult task of staying in love with this God I worship, I ran across (was given?) this opportunity to act out my faith and my convictions by taking part in the Fast for Our Future.  So, I’ll be fasting on Nov. 2 and 3 as a part of this movement.  My hope and plan is to spend the time during those two days praying for our nation’s leaders, elected and unelected, visible or quietly working behind the scenes.  I’ll pray for them to act with conscience and clarity, compassion and courage.  I’ll pray for them to sense their calling to the broken places in our society.  Most of all, I’ll pray that they will speak with and for the poor.  As a part of that prayer, I’ll write letters to my legislators outlining for them why I believe immigrants deserve the same rights to life that I enjoy by the sheer privilege of having been born where and who I was.  I won’t joke – this will be hard work.  I don’t naturally give up food (who does voluntarily?) and I certainly will struggle to keep my mind and heart focused on these goals.  But I truly believe that when people turn their faces to God, no matter what they understand as “divine,” the world changes. 

 

 

I rather hope you’ll join me, whether by fasting from food or by fasting from the distractions of the every day to spend time thinking about, praying for, or working toward reform for immigration.   

http://www.therisemovement.org/home.html

Fasting for a change.

{ October 19, 2008 @ 9:02 pm } · { personal reflection, political, poverty, spirituality }
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Okay, so I admit I’ve been thinking alot about food lately.  Actually, about being hungry.  In a weird confluence of events, I’ve been studying the gospel of Luke (known by some as the gospel about the least, last, and lost) and the 14th century Italian mystic Catherine of Sienna, who fasted herself to death, at the same time that I’ve been working on a Poverty Initiative through my school internship and the world’s food shortages and economic crises have come to terrifying head.  People are hungry, all over, in every country (even ours) and have been for various reasons throughout history.  It is a universal experience.  A book I’m reading right now, called Hunger: An Unnatural History, explores what it is that makes hunger so powerful – as a tool for oppression, a political statement, evidence of our hatred for our bodies or the bodies of others, in the lives of children and political prisoners, teen girls and the poor.  Throughout the book runs the question, what does it mean to be hungry? 

Of course, as a woman in what one of my friends irreverantly (but aptly) calls “Jesus School,” in my mind hunger is deeply tied to the world of spirituality.  Whether you claim a particular faith tradition or simply claim to be a part of the human family, I think we can all agree that there is something in this world that is larger than all of us -  God, a Supreme Being, energy, physics, the human spirit – whatever we call it, something ties all of life together into community.  Every living thing relies on other living things to survive.  So it seems to me that when there are children dying of starvation on an average of every 6 seconds every day, we’ve lost our connection.  People are hungry because other people are overfull.  Two years ago, I visited Haiti on a medical mission trip and saw terrible scarcity, “grocery store” shelves with 2 cans of beans and one 5 pound bag of rice as their sole inventory, women making pies out of dirt, water, and salt in order to feed their families.  Returning home, I walked into a Target Superstore to restock my own refrigerator and stopped cold and nauseous in the first aisle, where thousands of pounds of Halloween candie waited on clearance.  The much-ness of it was overwhelming.  In Haiti, not even the basics.  In the U.S., in my home town, food after a holiday, with the wrong packaging, being readied for the garbage.  And last week, driving at a fast-food drive through with my nuggets and fries in hand, I saw a man perched with a bedroll and pack on the curb next to a dumpster.  He was meticulously, carefully eating a single bun.  Tiny bites, watching each piece disappear.  He’d obviously gleaned it from the garbage.  Not even the basics, but in my lap, a greasy feast I didn’t even finish.  That sucks, you probably are saying.  But what does it have to do with this spirituality you’re talking about?  Yeah, that’s tricky.

I am not hungry for food.  I am not what Jesus called the ptochos, the poor, someone dependent upon others for their daily support, destitute, poverty-stricken, or in extreme want.  But I am someone who has a wealth of resources available – perhaps not much money on my debit card, but a 401-k, decent food in my fridge, a roof over my head, clothes to keep me warm, a good education, family.  Rather, I’m comfortable.  So comfortable, in fact, that it’s rather easy, on a day to day basis, to forget that there are many, literally billions, of people in the world who would look at my life with awe and think that I am the most fortunate person they’d ever met.  And I would be.  But this is not a gift from God.  I did not earn this privilege.  Other people are hungry because my life is full.  The food I eat cheaply is grown by men and women who make slave-wages without health benefits.  My clothes, sown by their families.  I received a good education and will continue to find work with little effort partly because of the privilege of my race, while my minority brothers and sisters are equally qualified for the same jobs and will be passed over.  I am not hungry because others are.  The connection between us has been broken.

We all must be aware of this injustice and look for ways to redistribute wealth, whether economic or political, so that every human being has a chance at a full life.  Dare I say, this is fact?  However, I am also aware of a great mystery, and it is that while we are surrounded by evidence of an economy of scarcity, a great pie with a limited number of pieces, another economy exists, as well.  I believe in an economy of abundance.  Despite the fact that our reality teaches us that there is not enough for everyone, it is an elaborate lie.  There is enough food in the world that, were market forces regulated to protect those without economic power, we could feed every child on the planet.  Enough money to insure, provide healthcare to, house, and educate every person.  If I really believe that God is working for the good of the world, then I also am forced to believe that people who claim to follow that God can renounce our insecurity, our fear of scarcity, and be a part of that good by providing for our fellow human beings out of our abundance.  There is enough… it’s just not in the right hands yet.

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