Five Ways to Fast

by Francesca A. Murphy - August 1, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

When I became a Catholic in my twenties, my family teased me that I would have to eat fish on Fridays – a food I had avoided since childhood. Their idea of Catholicism came mostly from old memories; by that time, in the early 1980s, Fishful Fridays had long ceased to be a badge of Catholic identity in the English-speaking world.

After Vatican II, our bishops told us to fast from whatever we wanted. But it was hard to remember to do a self-selected menu omission on one's own: The social context was gone, and so was the overall conception of Christian life into which Friday penance fit. So most Catholics abandoned weekly penance altogether.

In The Spirit of the Disciplines, the Baptist Dallas Willard taught Catholics more about the spiritual power of penitential acts than anything we'd learned from living Catholic spiritual writers for 50 years. Evangelical seriousness about fasting reminded Roman Catholics that Christianity is about growing in the Spirit, and is not merely a once-off decision. Catholics started to look with envy at the Orthodox, who took unabashed pleasure in their heritage, and began to regret having overcome the legalism of the preconciliar era by overthrowing its incarnationalism.

Impressed by the Christ-centred seriousness of the Protestants and the obedience of the Orthodox to tradition, Catholics became less "pro-choice" about fasting. We picked up the idea that penance doesn't end with whoops of joy on Easter morning; it can go on round the year – even Fridays.

Of course, new Catholic Fasters have to learn to navigate the pitfalls of legalism and moralism, and how to balance the command to secrecy with fasting as a public sign of religious identity – a difficult but not impossible task.

As for the fasting itself, a novelist could put old and new Catholic fasters into five general (though not necessarily separate) categories:

1. The Green Faster

Green fasters are not ascetic by taste, habit, or the exigencies of their bank balance. GFs are only financially challenged in the sense that they don't know how much money is in their account. They know the poor of Southeast Asia suffer from rising food costs, and they send donations by Paypal. The GF is not just a Fashion Faster; foodies are materialists, but their quite literal take on consumerism can still remind Christians that penance by abstinence from mere eating is the hardest kind.

The GF has read Matthew Scully's Dominion, though she had to skim the painful chapter on pig factories. Meatless Fridays turn out to be more authentically penitential then those who never tried it imagine. She forms a group called Veg4Lent, fires off a letter to her bishop proposing a vegetarian Lent, and gets back a note saying he isn't for introducing innovations into his diocese. She is put out, because she knows Benedictine monks were all veggies for centuries. GFs can't face full-blooded vegetarianism, but still believe Westerners eat too much meat.

The Green Faster is currently cooking her way through the curries in the World Food Cookbook, but is tempted to buy How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and eat lemon-ricotta pancakes instead. The GF is fasting to walk with Christ, but the life-buoy of secular rationalizations for abstention sometimes sinks her. The Green Faster doesn't deserve disapproval, but she won't convert anyone.

2. The Communitarian Faster

The Communitarian Faster talks about Alasdair MacIntyre – he tells us that Catholics need to recover outward signs of their collective identity. He recounts anthropologist Mary Douglas's essay "Fish on Fridays," which argued that Catholics lost their social glue when they dropped meatless Fridays in the 1960s.

The CF urges us to bring back the fish because it will reinforce our sense of Catholicism as a social group. If he has the benefit of seminary formation, he complains over lunch about the bishops' glaring ignorance of social anthropology and the significance of community-building penance, while we eat beans and he puts back a lamb curry – on a Friday in Lent. He has something to tell, but nothing to show.

Though Mary Douglas can teach us a lot about the social significance of food in Leviticus, fasting and feasting in Christ doesn't come into it. Community is a Good Thing, but too abstract to motivate anyone to fast.

3. The Mittel European/Mediterranean Faster

Latin and Central European Catholics didn't abandon fasting in the 1970s; jazzy invention is alien to the Catholicism of Central Europeans and Italians. Austrians spontaneously intersperse the adagio of fast with the allegro of feast. Eastern Europeans are inured to hardship by communism and post-communist brutalist capitalism. The purpose of pasta is to spread a little meat a long way; have you ever heard a Mediterranean say, "Westerners eat too much meat"?

When they travel West, MEM culture sticks to its religious identity. The female MEM Faster still serves salmon mousse in cut-glass goblets on Fridays. Either her mother did, or (if she's on the way to sainthood-via-martyrdom) her mother-in-law did. The male MEM basks in the admiration showered on him by colonials who revere his lack of New World puritanism.

MEM fasting is not only for Europeans. The Southern lady who, when asked, "Are you giving up wine?" replied, "We don't give up necessities" was an MEM at heart. The combination of the life of the bon viveur and the penitent is a great Catholic art form.

4. The Recent Convert Faster

To this faster, "Recent Convert" and "Roman Catholic" are synonyms. The RC Faster is logical, high-minded, and androgynous. S/he is shocked by the MEM's substitution of salmon sandwiches for roast beef on Fridays, and disapproves of the GF's "sentimentality" about animals and the Third World, which s/he thinks needs free trade, not handouts. S/he wasn't sure what to make of an old priest's observation that "fasting was much easier when we all did it together"; isn't it supposed to be difficult?

RC Fasters believe in transparency and sincerity, and that makes social solidarity in abstention a conundrum: It creates an external badge of social identity. To the RC Faster, keeping schtum about abstaining is as much of a moral obligation as abstaining. S/he thinks not telling means not being Pharisaic, but the RC Faster has yet to realize that it's the moralism that makes fasting legalistic, not the escape clauses.

The RC Faster is authentically abstemious but has turned penance into a heroic, Pelagian work.

5. The Secret Faster

The Secret Faster doesn't consider penance a moral obligation, but as something like the secret talismans entrusted to the heroes and heroines of Grimm's fairy stories: The magic will only work so long as you keep it secret. Fairy tales are grimlylegalistic: There are rules, and one of them is always to keep the source of the magical powers secret.

Christ told us to look like we're having a good time when we fast, so Secret Fasters try not to turn it into a moral obligation – another duty to carry out grudgingly. Orthodox friends delight in the SF's hospitality on fast and feast days alike, and some undiscerning Protestants imagine the SF is no saint, and never does any penance at all.

To blab about the secret is to forfeit its gift. Real fasting occurs between a soul and God. And because it grows out of this intimate friendship, it has the power to create both community and an authentic Catholic culture.

Francesca A. Murphy is a professor of Christian Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.