I started fasting the day after Ash Wednesday, on February 26th of this year. I didn't really know why I was doing it at the time; it just seemed right. I'd been reading about fasting in preparation for a Lenten study that I was teaching at church, and I guess I just got a little caught up in the idea. Fasting as an act of piety, this notion seems so quaint and anachronistic. I imagined monks taking chaste sips of water from a large, cool cistern. The idea of fasting seems holy to me. I can't remember ever feeling holy before. It's not the kind of thing that modern people really chase after. So, why the hell not? I thought. How hard could it possibly be?

The answer is that it's pretty hard. The first hurdle was deciding what kind of fast to pursue. When Lent was first observed, back in the fourth century, those who fasted ate but one meal a day and nothing else, except for Sundays. That single meal could not contain meat or eggs or milk or cheese. 

Now, right away this was going to be a problem. When I read this, my heart sank. I mean, without milk, cheese, meat and eggs, what are you supposed to eat? What else is there?

Jumping forward in history, we see that as of Vatican II, the fasting requirements have diluted to the point where Catholics are merely enjoined against eating meat on Fridays. I figured I'd split the difference: fast every day except Sunday, but eat whatever the hell I felt like during that one meal as long as it wasn't just obscene, like a deep-fried cheeseburger with a fried-egg and mayonnaise on top or something.

Now, going an entire day subsisting one only a single meal, without even a drink or a snack seemed a bit much. I mean, I wanted to feel a sense of discipline, but I didn't want to err on the side of asceticism. In the middle ages, the Church decided that a "collation" was allowed twice on fasting days. A collation consisted of something like a drink of water and a piece of bread, or a pear or somesuch. Aha! A collation! This, I realized, was just what the doctor had ordered. But here reality set in; I'm not prone to carry around a fruit basket or breadbox in my daily life. It's just not my style. Too complicated. So I set about looking for something else that I could use.

It hit me at the grocery store, as I was meandering through the personal hygiene aisle looking (in vain, as it turned out) for Hello Kitty toothpaste for my daughter who, for unknown reasons, had suddenly decided that she would no longer brush her teeth with anything else. I spied a big stack of Slim-Fast boxes against the wall. Curious, I stopped to look. These things are loaded with vitamins, relatively filling, and they taste like milkshakes. Plus, I now saw, this could be an opportunity to shed a few excess pounds while getting right with God. Suddenly fasting was starting to seem like a pretty useful proposition.

Now, I don't want to suggest that the only reason that I'm doing a Lenten fast is to lose weight. This would be a hasty conclusion that leaves out a number of crucial spiritual facts. But it might be fair to call it an "added inducement" to the whole process. A bit sheepishly, then, I put the giant box of Slim-Fast shakes in the shopping cart.

When I got home with the Slim-Fast, my wife was skeptical. "What's this?" she asked.

"Oh, I said. You know. Part of the Lenten fast. A collation. Fourteenth century monks did this."

"Fourteenth century monks drank Slim-Fast?"

"You know what I mean." 

"Whatever you say," she finally said.

Fasting, even if you do it with meat and milk and cheese and eggs and Slim Fast, is not easy. At least, not for me. Actually thinking about what I eat during the day has been kind of a rude awakening. Some things have occurred to me that I was not prepared for. For one, I realized that I have never given a moment's thought to how much I really eat. I just . . . eat. Whenever I feel like it. Halfway into the second day of the fast, I started to feel a strange, unfamiliar gnawing in my gut. A squirming, peal of dissatisfaction. What was this? I wondered. Indigestion? Stomach flu? No.

Hunger. It was hunger. I realized with an unpleasant vividness that I couldn't remember the last time I'd actually felt hungry. This is a painfully unpleasant realization to make if, like me, you are a person who believes he is in touch with the world's suffering and needs. To make the realization that in recent memory I hadn't gone even a half day without stuffing my face was a pyrrhic epiphany. It stung.

I thought about all of the food that I eat. The cheeseburgers and the fajitas and the pad thai and chicken parmesan and enchilada platters and Snickers bars and all of it washed down with gallons of Coke and Dr Pepper and sweet tea. I was repulsed by myself. If my stomach hadn't been completely empty, I might have puked.

Because I am a guy, and guys are not supposed to think about their weight, I hid the Slim-Fast drinks at work. I buried them in my bag, hid them under my car seat, stowed them in drawers. The ones I put in the fridge at work, I shoved behind week-old pizza and decaying containers from Mexican takeout places. I poured the drinks into Styrofoam cups so nobody would see me drinking them. I don't know why. Maybe I just felt silly; maybe I felt sheepish about the whole Lenten fast and didn't want to explain it. As I write this, I've got one hidden in the glove compartment; I'll have to sneak it in soon or drink it warm.

Here is the other uncomfortable realization: I'm as uncomfortable with my religion in public as I am with my Slim-Fast shakes. I don't wear a crucifix on a chain. I don't have one of those chrome Icthus symbols on my car. I don't wear a WWJD bracelet, and I wouldn't be caught dead wearing a tee-shirt that had the words, "Xtreme Jesus Follower!" emblazoned across it. I don't like to get Jesusy with people if I don't know that they're Christians. Don't get me wrong--I don't think my faith is any secret from my co-workers; my desk is littered with books by Thomas Merton and C.S. Lewis and Dallas Willard. But I'm timid about it. I'm about as far from St. Stephen as you can get and still call yourself a Christian.

About a year ago, one of my co-workers left the company on bad terms. I never found out what the dispute was, but the management of the company had nothing nice to say about him. A few weeks later, someone saw the former employee preaching on cable access television; he is a black man and a Baptist and his preaching was, shall we say, inspired. They made fun of him in the break room. I listened. I didn't join in, but I didn't say anything to stop it. I let it go.

I felt like Peter just before the cock crowed.

You may not know this, but pretzels are a Lenten food. They're made without eggs or milk, and the traditional pretzel shape is supposed to imply arms folded in prayer. So I've made pretzels the official snack food of my 2004 fast. A little bag of pretzels from the office candy machine allays a tiny bit of hunger. Of course, the pretzels that we buy now in sealed plastic bags are nothing like their monstrous, chewy Bavarian ancestors. They are small and unassuming; they're hard and unyielding.

Can you imagine what it must have felt like to have been a resident of some sleepy town in the seventeenth century--with a name like Gambshein or Bocholt or something--and to have taken one of those steaming hot pretzels straight from the oven of the town bakery? Your breath fogs in the air as you and your family walk along cobblestone streets toward the Gothic cathedral in the center of town, nibbling the pretzel slowly to make it last longer. Maybe you even slather a little brown mustard on top, while late winter snows drift gently out of a goose down sky. . .

It is not unpleasant for me to put myself there; it's getting easier to understand what delayed gratification and a little healthy self-denial can do for a person. It makes you a little more aware, a little more thankful for what you've got.

We tend to think of self-denial in terms of masochism and quaint asceticism. It brings up images of Reverend Dimmesdale scourging himself in secret, medieval saints wearing hairshirts. Fasting is not for us, it is for the likes of Gandhi and Buddhist monks.

But here is what I have learned since February 26th. Engaging in religious discipline is not the same thing as self-flagellation. It is all about attitude. If I am punishing myself for my sins, then I think the time is wasted. Jesus never asked us to do this. The claim of Christianity is that it frees us from the burden of sin; it does not drive it deeper into us. If, however, I am denying myself comfort and luxury because I want to make more space in my life for God to enter, then I think I'm on the right track.

A few days ago, just before bed I was ravenously hungry. So hungry, I would have considered eating rocks, or wood shavings, or even some of the atrocious food made for toddlers that my daughter loves so much. "You can't eat," I said to myself, out loud. "Don't blow it." As I said this, I saw that I was in danger of turning my Lenten fast into a macho self-competition. I was getting angry at myself for wanting to eat; I was rolling my eyes at my own perceived weaknesses. This was not what I'd gotten into this for. I wanted to get closer to God, not closer to my own ego. I wanted to shed my selfishness, not pounds and inches. Spiritual discipline is not a contest. It is not a weight-loss clinic. It is not a proving ground for anything. It is simply a way to clear a space within us so that God can move in.

I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I ate it, standing, in the kitchen. It was the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich I think I ever had.

Religion-Related Injuries. Good stuff. Check it out.