Vas jy of is jy klaar vas dat jy nie kan vas nie?
Extract from the book A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding your True Hungers in Lent by Christine Valters Paintner
Modern life seems to move at full speed and many of us can hardly catch our breath between the demands of earning a living, nurturing family and friendships, and the hundreds of small daily details like paying our bills, cleaning, and grocery shopping. More and more we feel stretched thin by commitments and lament our busyness, but without a clear sense of the alternative.
Some of us may claim “busyness” as a point of pride. Certainly, in Western Culture, busy is seen as the mark of a full and desirable life.
It can be challenging to know where to begin in dismantling this way of living. We may have people who depend on us, like children and aging parents. We may be terrified of slowing down and really listening to our lives. And yet so many of us are exhausted and depleted.
In This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley writes: “Our societies and communities have a way of grinding up and serving our dignity in portions based on our own human ideals and idols. In the history of the white Western world, you can trace a perversion of dignity in the name of usefulness. You are no longer in the image of God, you are currency.”
We cannot help but entwine our concept of dignity with how much a person can do.....we tend to assign a lesser social value to those whose “doing” cannot be enslaved in a given output. When we rush through our lives, we often don’t allow time to gather the pieces of ourselves so our fragmented selves can come together again.
When we allow rest, we awaken to the broken places that often push us to keep doing and producing and striving. There are things in life best done slowly.
Ont-dek
The Spiritual Practice of Fasting
Fasting is an invitation into authentic freedom, freedom from the things that weigh us down or keep us constricted.
We all hold onto old ideas about ourselves that keep us limited in what we believe we can do with our lives. We all fill our lives with words as a way to avoid what is really happening within us – whether we do that by our own words, repeating old stories, or turning up the radio or television to be saturated with the words of others. We live in a culture that depends on distracting us from our true hungers, because when we identify with these surface hungers we will consume more and more in the search for satisfaction.
What are the things you hunger for?
I don’t mean cravings like your favourite meal or drink, or the obsessive scrolling through our social media accounts we can sometimes get caught up in, which often fuels our anxiety over the world or our sense of the inadequacy of our lives. These things are not ultimately nourishing. What is nourishing are the things that are life-giving, joy-bringing, peace-arising, purpose-revealing.
Fasting can be a way of temporarily trying to remove something that feels compulsive or not life-giving in favour of embracing something that does deeply nourish. Physical fasting from various kinds of consuming in a world oversaturated with things can be valuable. But ultimately, they point us to other things in our lives that numb us out with distraction or heighten our anxiety and fearfulness.
I want to invite you into a different kind of fast, one which helps you identify those patterns and habits that distract you from the fullness of life and open up space for the feast that awaits each of us. Most of what I’m releasing are the old patterns and ways of being that deplete me and obstruct my full access to the divine image carved into my heart.
You are invited into a nonphysical fast to explore what it means to fast from multitasking and rushing and instead to embrace presence, abundance, slowness, tenderness, unfolding, and mystery.
In a culture that has everything available to us 24/7, it can feel like an act of deprivation to give up certain things. Yet what I keep discovering is that in a world glutted by choice, my heart feels more at peace in releasing what is not necessary and in fact weights me down or numbs me out.
Fasting can help us to remember our true hunger.
At heart, the act of fasting is about growing in relationship to the sacred presence. But we can get overwhelmed by our hungers for things, especially in a culture that worships consumerism and in which the divide between rich and poor grows ever wider. Stepping back from this helps us to see what we are really yearning for in our lives.
Fasting can create breathing space for a new perspective on our lives.
When we release our life-denying habits and thoughts, we discover a new freedom to live differently. This is an internal freedom not dictated by outer circumstances.
[Firstly], we fast so as to clear space within our minds and hearts and souls to await what holy newness is being revealed to us and to recognise it at work, as Isaiah (48:6-7) says, “Created just now, this very moment.” God is at work moment by moment, bringing new life to birth in places we did not expect.
The second part of each call to fast – the embrace – is also essential. We become aware of and fast from destructive patterns in our lives and direct our attention and energy toward what is life-giving, toward our true hunger and the feast.
Ultimately, the practice of fasting is about making more space within us to encounter our deepest, most radiant selves. How do we listen to the whispers of the Holy One when we constantly distract ourselves with social media and doomscrolling. How do we discover the radical abundance available to us, not of food or entertainment, but of nourishing gifts like joy, peace, love, and gratitude?
Ont-leer
If you’re part of the Christian tradition, you may have some kind of food you give up for the Lenten season as a way to be more mindful and in solidarity with those who hunger for food and shelter. One of the issues I have always had with Lenten fasting, is that it seems to have become for many a second chance at new year’s resolutions. Fasting from chocolate is not a bad thing in itself, but if we approach it from a diet mentality or a sense of shame about eating certain foods, then we are not in the spirit of fasting as a spiritual practice. In fact, for those of us with a history of any kind of disordered eating, fasting can trigger our need to eat the “correct way” – whatever that might mean for you. This kind of fasting is merely an extension of the cultural mindset of body shame and control.
I invite you to release the deprivation mindset as much as possible. It is not by eating as little as possible or denying ourselves that we transform and grow in holiness.
Fasting is ultimately a paradox of emptying out to be filled, paring back to receive a different kind of feast, one that nourishes our true hungers. Our fast is in an act of discernment of the habits that keep us from this rich feast available to us.
I invite you to not just try to identify and set aside these ways of being, which restrict the fullness of life, but to also actively embrace and feast upon the rich spiritual nourishment available to us.
Ont-moet
Invitations to a Different Kind of Fast
a. Contemplation
The root of the word “contemplation” comes from the Latin word templum, which means a piece of ground or building consecrated for worship. When we contemplate, we consecrate an inner space in which to dwell for a while. When we move into a contemplative stance, we create a sanctuary within ourselves through which new consciousness can awaken and emerge, a consciousness needed to cocreate a more loving and just world. While society tells us we must always be doing and producing to bring forth anything of value, the invitation is to something counter-cultural and paradoxical: when we bring our heart, mind, and body fully present and slow ourselves down enough to truly listen to our hearts and the Divine Heart, we hear the creative responses that in our otherwise everyday rushings have no room to emerge. When we practice contemplative prayer, we may meet moments of profound intimacy and connection to the underlying unity of all life. We may also have many moments of boredom and distraction. That is our human condition and the reason why we return to practice again and again. Our goal is not perfection, but consistency. The great teacher of centering prayer Thomas Keating was told once by a woman that she struggled so much to greet silence and found herself distracted a thousand times. His response was to offer praise for the opportunity she was given to return to Divine Love a thousand times.
When we return to presence with compassion, we experience a profound grace. Each time our thoughts stray or we find ourselves unsettled, we are called to bring love to the whole of ourselves. Regular practice helps to cultivate within us an orientation to the Holy so that in the ordinary moments we become aware of the sacred presence. It can help sustain us through the challenging moments when God feels far away and we feel alone.
Through contemplative practice we also can move to a space beyond words, where our intuitive understanding comes to insights before we can articulate them. It is a heart-centered knowing that is receptive rather than grasping, intuitive rather than logical, and a slow ripening rather than a quick fix. In this inner spaciousness we begin to transform our wounded and broken places to remember our original wholeness. Slowly we become people who live in and respond to the world through love. Becoming people who live in the fullness of love is the deepest hunger of all.
Contemplative practice is at its heart a commitment to consciously enter into a deep sense of inner stillness where we release our life-denying patterns and ways of being in order to nourish ourselves and connect to the Sacred Source pulsating through our lives. It is a way of falling in love with the world and the divine presence that animates it. These practices take many forms across spiritual traditions. As you begin these fasts, it is worthwhile to experiment with different ways of praying to see which one feels the most life-giving in this season of your life and for the fast.
We are invited into a daily rhythm of contemplative practice. While reading and understanding are important aspects of learning a new spiritual pathway, just as important is embodying these new understandings, practising them, reflecting on them, pondering them in a spacious way that allows them to transform your heart.
Theologian Tyler Sit, in his book Staying Awake, defines spiritual practice as “daily visits with God to build up a relationship and realign yourself with God’s deep desires for the world.” “Spiritual practice,” he writes, “are disciplined truth-telling and truth-listening.” As we consider how contemplation meets our journey of fasting, we might think of prayer as nurturing a friendship and intimacy with the divine presence. We show up and open ourselves to the transformation that comes when we listen for the truth of our lives.
b. An Invitation to Fast from Multitasking and Inattention so that we Embrace Full Presence to the Moment.
You are invited to fast from multitasking and the destructive energy of inattentiveness. In our attempts to do many things, none are done well, and none as a result nourish us. The practice you will look at instead will be a beholding of each thing, each person, each moment, as you respond to that hunger for presence.
It can be so tempting to think that in our busy lives multitasking will somehow make us more efficient and productive. We bemoan not having more hours in the day, but in the hours we do have our attention is scattered, and we’re always trying to keep up.
We spread our gaze between so many demands that we may get many things done, even as we discover checking everything off the to-do list didn’t leave us satisfied or nourished.
St Benedict – (God meets you where you are) we are called to always be beginners in the spiritual life. The landscape of the desert is often understood as a place of new beginnings, we are confronted with ourselves, naked and without defences, called again and again to bring back all our broken and denied parts into wholeness.
For the desert mothers and fathers, the monastic cell was a central concept in their spirituality. The outer cell is really a metaphor for the inner cell, a symbol of the deep soul – work we are called to, to become fully awake.
It is the place where we come into full presence with ourselves and all of our inner voices, emotions, and challenges and are called to not abandon ourselves (our bodies, our cells) in the process through distraction or numbing. We also encounter God deep in our own hearts.
One of the monks came to the Desert Father, Abba Moses, and asked for a word. Abba Moses replied: ‘Go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’
In his book, Listen to the Desert, Gregory Mayers describe the cell this way:
Abba Moses’ “cell” is a metaphor for the imprisoned self. The final sense to the word “cell” meaning the “liberated self”, wherein life becomes transparent and obvious… Your cell has no walls, neither physical ones of mortar or wood, nor walls of flesh and bone, nor psychological ones defining a separate, independent self. The interior “cell” of our hearts is that place of interior freedom.
For the desert fathers and mothers, interior watchfulness was the entire focus of their lives and part of their devoting themselves to unceasing prayer and awareness of the sacred.
Desert Mother, Amma Matrona wrote: “We carry ourselves wherever we go and we cannot escape temptation by mere flight.
We carry our “stuff” – our issues, our struggles, our compulsions – with us wherever we are. While our impulse may be to flee to a new place (thing) when something is not working out for us, the desert wisdom is to stay and become present to ourselves just as we are.
Distraction is seductive because it doesn’t make demands on us. But ultimately this deeper hunger for what is true and holy within will call to us though the veil of our diversions. This is a lifelong journey, not something we achieve fully, but an ongoing unveiling and revealing of who we were created to be.
Therese Taylor-Stinson in her book Walking the way of Harriet Tubman writes about the need for internal freedom in our human journey as a continual process of discovery. “It is both a quest for a deep emotional freedom as we begin the journey to emancipation and an ongoing struggle as we pull back the layers of enslavement that we encounter along the way”.
Stability demands that we stay with difficult experiences and stay present to the discomfort they create in us.
When we are focusing on the ways we try to accomplish too many things at once, we are never really present for anything. We are called to full presence to our inner life. We cultivate the inner witness and watch as our thoughts scurry between different states, notice our internal responses to things, and observe when our minds move to distraction as a way of avoiding engagement with life. When we become conscious of our methods of distraction, we can learn to bring ourselves always back to our experience. In this attentiveness to our inner world, we can then bring this kind of loving gaze to our outer tasks.
To behold means to hold something in your gaze. To behold is not to stare or glance; it is not a quick scan or an expectant look. We can’t multitask and behold at the same time. Beholding has a slow and spacious quality to it. Your vision becomes softer as you make room to take in the whole of what you are seeing. There is a reflective and reverential quality to this kind of seeing. You release your expectations of what you think you will see and receive what is actually there, and in the process everything can shift. To behold is to meet the subject of your gaze with love.
Writer Cole Arthur Riley, in her beautiful book This Here Flesh, describes this kind of loving attentiveness to the world: “For me, most simply, contemplative spirituality is a fidelity to beholding the divine in all things.”
Riley goes on to describe wonder as the heart of this presence to the world and what holds her faith together. “We have found ourselves too busy for beauty. We spin our bodies into chaos with the habits and expectations of the dominating culture, giving and doing and working…. We live depleted of that rest which is the only reliable gateway to wonder.” When we rush though life, we miss the moments that spark wonder. When we miss wonder, life can start to feel shallow and without meaning or beauty.
Seeing in this other way takes time and patience. It is the view of the desert. We can’t force the hidden dimension of the world to come forth; we can only create a receptive space in our hearts in which it can arrive.
I invite you to fast from distraction and multitasking so that you might embrace the practice of attention and behold, creating space to see things differently.
i. The How
Notice that God is in all things.
Slow down and become aware of the beauty around you; the oak tree outside your office window, the smile of the lady serving your tea, the laughter of your children, the smell of the first cup of coffee in the morning; the sun rays on your favourite couch.
Stop during the day and notice the moments that spark wonder. You do not need to discern it at that moment just notice it. At the end of each day, do the Examen and reflect on those wonder moments where you were fully present and what it meant to you.
ii. Reflection Questions:
When you look at patterns of overdoing and overcommitment, what do you discover beneath those? What are they helping to distract you from.
What kind of boundaries on certain activities and distractions might you need to set in your life to give yourself the gift of presence.
What touchstones could you engage to help you remember to come back to the present moment. A chime on your phone? A stone in your pocket or on your desk in the office?
c. An invitation to Fast from Speed and Rushing and to Embrace Slowness and Pausing.
You are invited to fast from speed and rushing through your life, causing you to miss the grace shimmering right here in this holy pause. Our culture worships productivity, and in its pursuit, many of us are depleted from exhaustion and hunger for slowness.
The holy pause calls us to a sense of reverence for slowness, for mindfulness, and for the fertile dark spaces between our goals where we can pause and center ourselves, and listen. We can open up a space within for God to work. We can become fully conscious of what we are about to do rather than mindlessly completing another task. The holy pause can also be the space of integration and healing. When we rush through our lives, we often don’t allow time to gather the pieces of ourselves so our fragmented selves can come together again. When we allow rest, we awaken to the broken places that often push us to keep doing and producing and striving. There are things in life best done slowly.
While the desert mothers and fathers write extensively about diligence and discipline in the spiritual life, there are also some wonderful stories that remind us about the need to give rest to the body and soul.
A hunter in the desert saw Abba Anthony enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. Wanting to show him that it was necessary sometimes to meet the needs of the brethren, the old man said to him, “Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.” So he did. The old man then said, “Shoot another,” and he did so. Then the old man said, “Shoot yet again,” and the hunter replied “If I bend my bow so much I will break it.” Then the old man said to him, “It is the same with the work of God. If we stretch the brethren beyond measure they will soon break. Sometimes it is necessary to come down to meet their needs.” When he heard these words the hunter was pierced by compunction and, greatly edified by the old man, he went away. As for the brethren, they went home strengthened.
We live in a world that wants us to shoot arrows from our bow again and again, without regard for how stretched we feel, how close to breaking we often come with the multiple demands placed upon us. Western Culture prizes productivity and busyness. We strive after accomplishments and checking things off our lists. So little of it truly satisfies us. Just as Jesus took regular time for rest and slowness, so too the desert elders valued a slow rhythm of life. They weren’t in a rush to get anywhere because they trusted in the long, slow unfolding of time. They knew spiritual transformation was not a race.
Rest, slowness, pausing are all pathways to a liberation of body and soul, not a reward for good work later on. It is a disruption of a system that would exploit our labour until we can work no longer, treating us, as Riley writes, like “currency”. (This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley)
Consider embracing the practice of resting, doing nothing at all, making room for God to erupt in new ways in the spaces between.
i. The How
Where do you see opportunities for breathing spaces and slowness within your days? The monastic tradition invites us into the practice of stopping one thing before beginning another. It is the acknowledgment that in the space of transition and threshold is a sacred dimension, a holy pause full of possibility.
What might it be like to allow just a five- minute window to sit in silence between appointments? Or if, after finishing a phone call or checking your email, you take just five long, slow, deep breaths before pushing onto the next thing?
We often think about these in-between times as wasted moments and inconveniences, rather than opportunities to return again and again, to awaken to the gifts right here, not the ones we imagine waiting for us beyond the next door. But what if we built in these thresholds between our daily activities, just for a few moments to intentionally saviour silence and breath?
When we pause between activities or moments in our day, we open ourselves to the possibility of discovering a new kind of presence to the “in-between times.” When we rush from one thing to another, we skim over the surface of life, losing that sacred attentiveness that brings forth revelations in the most ordinary of moments.
Theologian and mystic Howard Thurman writes in Meditations of the Heart that “One could not begin the cultivation of the prayer life at a more practical point than deliberately to seek each day, and several times a day, a lull in the rhythm of daily doing, a period when nothing happens that demands active participation.” This lull of being, rather than doing, is a holy pause. This place between is a place of stillness, where we let go of what came before and prepare ourselves to enter fully into what comes next.
We are called to shift our priorities so that we center resting in God as the primary focus of our lives, instead of using work as our starting point in considering what is valuable.
You are invited to fast from rushing through life and overscheduling your commitments. Offer yourself the gift of pausing before and after appointments whenever possible, to simply saviour the sheer grace of the moment. You may experience a restlessness in these times between; you may need to slow your body and mind down with slow breathing. Often, we are caught up in overstimulation and our bodies are holding anxiety. Doing helps to relieve that, but may also lead us to exhaustion and burnout.
The desert way also calls us to value holy leisure, times when we are not directing our attention on achieving anything, but simply resting in the goodness of the divine.
ii. Reflection Questions
What are the ways you push forward in your life, even when tired or depleted?
What are the places and moments when you can breathe more slowly?
How can you make your days more restful?
What are the commitments in your life you could release to make more space for being?
LEES
Extract from the book A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding your True Hungers in Lent by Christine Valters Paintner