This update on my Earth Day fast has taken longer to write than I expected. I appreciate the folks who checked in with me and wondered how it went. Here is my report.
On Monday, April 22, around 9:15 p.m., I broke my 24-hour, water-only Earth Day fast with a prayer and a light salad drizzled with drops of lemon juice. I went to bed shortly after, successfully resisting the temptation to indulge in some mint chocolate chip ice cream (organic, of course) in the refrigerator. I slept well and resumed my regular eating habits the next morning.
That’s how my Earth Day fast ended.
I find I can’t summarize the whole 24-hour experience in a pithy, Twitter-friendly form. Portions of the books I had been reading about fasting suggested one would potentially experience a mystical union with God and learn to suffer happily. Neither one of those describe my general experience.
One of the challenges with the fast was that I still had to work that day and do normal household tasks. Even though I prayed during the day and took a long walk at lunch, I found myself unable to create as much space as I would have liked to for mindfulness of God.
What I will say is that I was far more attentive to each moment as it went by. I was prepared for this from my shorter Good Friday fast. Emotions and thoughts stood out more sharply. I was also far more aware of my body. My normal instincts, I found, were to appease my body’s appetities as quickly as possible. Following what I had read, however, I did my best to direct my thoughts and emotions towards God when I felt physical discomfort.
I began my day with the reading of Psalm 104. Two phrases from the psalm became my go-to centering phrases – “…the earth is full of your creatures” and “I will sing to the Lord all my life.” As a result, those phrases imprinted themselves in my mind. In fact, they have come to mind every day since.
You might wonder how hungry I became. In The Sacred Art of Fasting, Thomas Ryan explains that the gnawing in the stomach we feel when we go without food for awhile is not technically hunger. Here’s what he writes about that gnawing:
“It’s not a genuine hunger pang (in the sense that your body needs the food) or a distress signal. It’s just the alimentary tract accommodating itself to a reduced workload.”
My brain and my body had a spirited debate about the veracity of that statement.
Nevertheless, for much of the day, I followed Ryan’s advice. I drank filtered water when I felt discomfort in my stomach. This worked just fine. Calmly naming that discomfort, moving through it, and continuing with life worked surprisingly well. Which is to say that it didn’t seem too intense or mystical.
Until about 8 p.m.
At that point, my body became much more insistent. I had a harder time staying focused on anything other than my body. This happened while I was driving around looking for a good birthday card for my father. Much sharper discomfort emanated from my core. Walking through a grocery store and a pharmacy stacked with snacks didn’t help.
Was I going to give in? Was I going to fight this sharp discomfort with my will?
Eventually, I found myself leaning into it. And from my heart came intense, urgent prayer to God out of both spiritual and physical need. This prayer was simple, direct, emotional, desperate. It came out of my weakness and forced humility. It was for me and also for God’s earth which needs God’s protection and intervention so badly. I have not had an intense prayer experience like that before.
Here are some other thoughts and notes from the fast:
Increased awareness of God’s earth
I walked to and from work that day. In the morning, there was bright sun. Buds on trees and shrubs were bursting. Male red-winged blackbirds were making a racket as they staked out their territories. During my normal lunch period I walked around the farm our organization owns and manages. I took extra time to spend some time around the beautiful elm tree that has somehow survived all of the years.
The elm tree of the Prairie Crossing Farm on April 22, 2019.
On my walk back home, a soft rain brought a different, more mellow atmosphere. I paid particular attention to the large ant mounds that were visible in a recently burned prairie.
Sympathy for the hungry and needy
It is easy in the abstract to feel sympahty for the hungry and needy when one’s stomach is full. That sympathy is much more heartfelt when one is hungry oneself. I could not imagine a child concentrating in school on an empty stomach. It is heartbreaking to think of children in American and in the rest of the world experiencing hunger on a regular basis.
This broken world
To be honest, I unconsciously expected my day to be smooth and on a spiritually higher plane. I think I expected to find myself able to handle difficulties more calmly and easily.
In general, I did find my thinking clear and decisive. But when I read a group email that I took as directly insulting to me in an emerging grassroots group, my spiritual serenity didn’t do so well. The personal attack stung despite my fast and my spiritual alertness. I tried not to think about it. That just made it worse.
This was a reminder of the brokenness of the world that permeates relationships. It highlighted the serious fractures in community relationships that prevent us from creating a just world and from truly being God’s selfless shepherds of the world. What hope does Creation have? What hope do we have?
Seeking guidance takes sustained focus
One of my hopes going into the fast is that I would gain greater insight into the direction of my life. That did not emerge at all. I think this was in part because I did not have the space to really pray and write about the topic.
The tick
My interactions with Creation were not all beauty and light. After I took my walk around the farm here, I settled down at my desk and dived into my work. About an hour later I felt a light prickling on the skin of my right just below my knee.
When I pulled up my pant leg, there was a slow-moving tick. I instantly and instinctively flicked the tick onto the floor.
An ethical bind presented itself. I did not feel one with Creation at that moment. Would I kill the tick out of anger? I am not proud to admit that I considered various creative methods of doing so. But what was the right thing to do in light of my faith?
Just then I saw a group of energetic chickens making their way through our orchard and parking lot in the company of one of our staff. It clicked. Chickens like to eat insects and other small bugs.
So the tick was fed to a chicken. Instead of violence from anger, a chicken was able to do what it naturally does. From the life of the tick, the chicken gained sustenance. A good, protein-rich egg would result.
Belief and unbelief
When I am honest, I find my belief is mixed with unbelief. My faith compelled me to try this fast. My lack of faith prompted me, deep inside, to question whether it would actually connect me to the spiritual reality of God. I took that step. I did find a heightened awareness of life around me. I also was acutely aware of my own weakness, a deep need for God, and a desperation for God to save what is left of Creation. It requires almost too much faith for me to pray for the renewal of Creation, for God to fulfill his promise of a new heaven and a new earth.
I found, too, how easily I normally pass through life in an unconscious way. The fast woke me up. Maybe faith is, in part, about being truly awake?
As I meditate further on the fast and how it didn’t seem to quite live up to the ideals I had read about, it occurs to me that I was naive. Like any practice, whether spiritual or otherwise, one doesn’t just try it once and suddenly reap all of the benefits. Spiritual practices require practice.
I realize my experience of church has not prepared me for this. This quote from Dallas Willard in The Spirit of the Disciplines rings true to me:
“One of the greatest deceptions in the practice of the Christian religion is the idea that all that really matters is our internal feelings, ideas, beliefs, and intentions. It is this mistake about the psychology of the human being that more than anything else divorces salvation from life, leaving us a headful of vital truths about God and a body unable to fend off sin.”
I want the abundant life Jesus offered. Life involves our spirits and our bodies. Fasting is an ancient practice of unifying our spirits and our minds and of opening our hearts to God. So I intend to keep practicing and seeing where it leads.
And I would like to do it with others.
I realize that my fast ended up being an individual experience. Our inner spiritual life does need feeding. But just as we are both spiritual and physical beings, we need both individual development and community bonds. I hope someday to find a community of believers who want to embark on fasts and other spiritual practices together.
I pray that you, too, will look for ways to deepen your faith-life. Even when it means you’re not exactly sure what to expect.
P.S. On behalf of my family, I made two donations at the end of my fast. One was to Cool Learning Experience, a summer camp run by First Baptist Church in Waukegan, Illinois, by my friend Barbara Waller. It provides a nature-oriented summer camp experience for chidren and youth in the Waukegan area who would normally not have summer camp experiences and who would be unlikely to get much experience with nature. Barbara has made the development of this camp her life mission for the last decade and has impacted, with many staff, volunteers, and supporters, hundreds of lives.
We also made a donation to African Parks, a non-profit conservation organization that rehabilitates and manages important protected areas in partnership with governments and local communities. Through this organization, people around the world are able to help resource-challenged African countries manage and defend their natural treasures. Rangers in these parks are in a life-and-death war to stop poachers from wiping out elephants and other increasingly rare animals. Global forces are driving this poaching. Support from around the world is needed to stop it.
