As Lent comes around once again, many Christians turn to fasting (often by giving something up), just as people of many other religions turn to fasting at the appointed times in their own seasonal cycles.  There’s a trend these days for “giving up” something that isn’t good for us or for society to be coupled with “taking up” something that is good for us or for society.  Good works are, of course, to be valued and no doubt this trend is well-intentioned.  However, I think there’s a danger of this trend diminishing the value of fasting by giving the impression that fasting is a shallow, selfish act only for personal benefit:  something that it is meaningless unless we also bow to the worldly cult of busyness.

To understand fasting better, I have recently been pondering some words of the Log Lady*:

“Food is interesting.  For instance, why do we need to eat?  Why are we never satisfied with just the right amount of food to maintain good health and proper energy?  We always seem to want more and more.  When eating too much, the proper balance is disturbed and ill health follows.  Of course, eating too little food throws the balance off in the opposite direction and there is the ill health coming at us again.  Balance is the key.  Balance is the key to many things.”

For me, balance is indeed the key to many things.  A balanced diet is certainly the key to physical good health.  Balance in all our desires, not just in our appetite for food, is the key to mental good health:

“Are our appetites – our desires – undermining us?  Is the cart in front of the horse?”

Mental illness, such as depression, is very adept at using our appetites to undermine us.  It can persuade us that giving in to the urge to overindulge will make us feel better, only to castigate us as failures when we achieve this readily attainable imbalance.  Alternatively, it can persuade us that the only solution is to deny all our desires at once, only to castigate us as failures when we don’t achieve this unattainable imbalance.  These are all part of the power games that make us hide from ourselves:

“Sometimes we want to hide from ourselves:  we do not want to be us.  It is too difficult to be us.  It is at these times that we turn to drugs or alcohol or behaviour to help us forget that we are ourselves.  This, of course, is only a temporary solution to a problem which is going to keep returning and sometimes these temporary solutions are worse for us than the original problem.”

When we hide from God, as in Eden, we are also hiding from ourselves.  It is only when we are prepared to embrace balance in our lives and stop hiding from ourselves that we stop hiding from God.  Thus, as well as being the key to physical and mental good health, balance is also the key to spiritual good health.  In balance we see truth.  In truth we see God.

How we go about achieving balance in our appetites is bound to be a very personal thing.  For some, directly confronting particular appetites that tend to control them will be the way.  For others, confronting one particular appetite and bringing that into balance will be a means of bringing their other appetites into balance too.  This may even involve giving up the same thing year after year.  Whilst this may appear tokenistic (perhaps as being merely a dietary aid), for the person involved that one thing may be the key to bringing everything else back into balance and creating that space in their lives within which to see God.

Seeing God is an end worthy of itself.  It is what we were created for.  When we see God – when we achieve that balance in our lives – the good works will follow, although they might not be the works that we would have chosen by ourselves.  By all means take something up for Lent, but don’t give up on giving up.

 

* The Log Lady is an enigmatic character from the enigmatic TV series Twin Peaks:  “Who’s the lady with the log?”  “We call her the Log Lady.”