Transcript

Hi.

I'm Emily Stimpson Chapman, author of The Catholic Table.

Welcome back.

Today, in our discussion of the book, we're going to look at feasting and fasting.

When I came back into the church and was still newly recovered from my eating disorder, both feasting and fasting were hard for me.

I didn't understand either.

I didn't know how to do either.

I knew how to restrict my food intake, you know, I knew how to eat too much, but I knew how to do so only for the sake of my body, not for the sake of my soul.

I also only knew how to fast or feast with a spirit of fear and anxiety and guilt.

To me, fasting meant starvation, feasting meant binging or overindulgence.

I had a hard time understanding how either could help me grow closer to God or live my Catholic faith.

But the more I read about the church's traditions of feasting and fasting, and the more I started leaning into both of those traditions, the more the understanding of food I'd found in the Eucharist came to life.

The idea of food as a sign of God's love and as a foretaste of the Eucharist became even more powerful when lived in the context of feasting and fasting.

Before I say anything more though, I wanna make it really clear that if you are still in the throes of an eating disorder or early in the recovering process of an eating disorder, neither feasting nor fasting are for you right now, okay?

You need to learn to feed yourself well, to practice moderation in all things, and nourish your body with just the right amount of food, not too much, not too little, before you do any feasting and fasting beyond the minimal required by the church.

So, no meat on Fridays in Lent.

For the rest of you though, the fasts and feasts of the church can be a great gift, not only for learning how to see food with Catholic eyes, but for growing in holiness, growing in virtue, and learning to consecrate your days, your body, and your appetites to Christ.

So, let's start by talking about fasting.

Fasting is something you hear about on Instagram and Facebook all the time, right?

People these days love talking about their juice fast or their liver cleansing fasts or how they're losing weight with intermittent fasting, but this isn't the kind of fasting the church calls us to do, or the kind of fasting that holy men and women have been doing for thousands of years, even before Christ came.

Juice fasts and intermittent fasting are about the body, right?

They're about getting healthy or staying healthy or losing weight.

The fasting that Moses did before he received the Ten Commandments from God, the fasting that David did to atone for the murder of Bathsheba's husband, the fasting that Jesus did in the desert for 40 days, and the fasting that pretty much every saint from Saint Anthony of Egypt to Pope Saint John Paul II have taken on in the centuries since, all of it has been about the soul.

It's been about spiritual health, both our own and others'.

It's been about growing closer to God and becoming more and more of the men and women that he made us to be.

Now, if I were to write something like that for, say, The New York Times, plenty of people would scoff at me, and some of those people would be Catholics.

When I was researching fasting several years back, I came across plenty of pre-Lenten articles in Catholic papers, because before Lent is really the only time Catholics talk about fasting anymore, and those articles were encouraging people to skip fasting from sweets and other tasty foods and instead take on more ephemeral fasts, like fasting from gossip or driving your car to work or, my personal favorite, indifference.

I can appreciate the sentiment.

Indifference is bad.

Gossip is bad.

Driving your car to work, uh, less so, but the first two things aren't things you're supposed to fast from.

God doesn't want you taking a temporary break during Lent, or any other time of the year, from gossip and indifference.

He doesn't want you gossiping or being indifferent ever.

Those things are bad, okay?

Don't do them.

But eating?

Eating isn't bad.

Chocolate isn't bad.

They're good.

They're gifts from God.

So that's why we fast from them, to remember that while chocolate is good, God is better, to remember not to confuse the created good with the creator of the good, to remember that we are a union of body and soul and so what we do with our bodies affects our souls.

Grace works its way from the outside in, and with good actions healing and strengthening our soul, making us more and more of the men and women that God made us to be.

It's that relationship between body and soul that makes fasting such an effective tool for spiritual growth.

It gives us a way to atone for our sins.

You know, it allows us to use our bodies not just to tell God we're sorry, but to actually show Him we're sorry by denying ourselves something good for love of Him.

Fasting also gives us a way to put right our disordered desires.

You know, so often it's our emotions and bodily desires that dictate our actions.

That's a consequence of the fall.

Our reason is supposed to be guiding our actions, but often it's our fear, our anger, our insecurity, our lust for power or fame or sex or food that's running the show.By denying one of those desires, the desire for food, fasting helps put reason back in charge.

In that, fasting helps us grow in virtue.

It forces us to flex our spiritual muscles and grow stronger as we resist temptation in the form of a gooey piece of German chocolate cake.

Muscles toned by controlling one appetite, hunger, can then help us control other appetites: anger, revenge, greed, praise, power, pleasure, and lust.

The fifth-century monk, St. John Cassian, said, It's impossible to extinguish the fires of concupiscence without first restraining the desires of the stomach, or another way of putting it, as a wise old priest once told my husband, Cookie today, woman tomorrow.

When we struggle with our fasts or even fail at those fasts, succumbing to the way-too-tempting chocolate brownie sitting all by its lonesome in the pantries, we learn something else: We learn humility.

Fasting is almost always guaranteed to teach us what weak creatures we really are, how on our own, we can't do anything good, even say no to a brownie.

In that, fasting drives us to prayer.

It forces us to call upon God for help and thank him for all the help he gives us daily.

Fasting also makes our prayers more powerful.

Jesus told us that some evils could only be overcome through prayer and fasting.

The church takes him at his word.

So, exorcists fast before casting out demons.

Popes, including most recently Pope Francis, have called for fasting in times of war.

They understand that fasting adds an urgency and power to our prayers.

It makes our prayers more powerful, and it does that by bringing the whole person into the prayer so that we're praying not just with our hearts and minds, but with our bodies.

It is, in a sense, a consecration of the whole person to a particular prayer, and God responds to that.

Through it all, fasting helps us remember who we are: weak, frail, hungry men and women dependent upon God's grace.

When we fast with a mind for God and not ourselves, the hunger we experience reminds us of our fundamental neediness, not just for food, but ultimately for God.

That God is a God who hung from a cross, hungering in body and soul for our salvation.

He hungers for that still.

Through our hunger, we can find the one who hungers for us.

There is one more thing fasting does, though, that's a little more fun.

Fasting prepares us for feasting.

If you're searching the church's calendar for the greatest feasts and greatest fasts, you will usually find them cozied up next to each other, with the fasts preparing us for the feast to come and the feasts helping us better understand the fast that just passed.

In the balance, though, Christians who plan their meals according to the liturgical calendar will find themselves doing a lot more feasting than fasting.

In the Catholic Church, every season of fasting is followed by a longer season of feasting.

Lent is 40 days, Easter's 50.

Advent lasts a little over four weeks.

Christmas lasts a solid five and a half weeks, beginning on December 25th and running right up to February 2nd, the Feast of the Presentation.

Moreover, while the Latin Church mandates two days of fasting, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, plus another 48 days or so of penance, most other Fridays throughout the year, our calendar provides about three times as many opportunities for feasting.

We feast on Christmas Day and Easter Day, holy days of obligation, solemnities, and every single Sunday, all of which the church considers little Easters.

We also can choose to celebrate favorite saints and martyrs on the dozens and dozens of days set aside to remember them.

Heck, we can even feast in honor of buildings, like the Basilica of St. John Lateran, and in honor of furniture, sort of.

We celebrate the papacy by celebrating the literal chair of St. Peter.

Honestly, that kind of feasting is one of my favorite things about being Catholic.

Like, we know that grace works through matter, and we are all about having some cake to celebrate that.

Of course, the ultimate cause for our feasting is never a saint or a stunning work of architecture.

The ultimate cause is always Christ.

Fasting teaches us about our hunger, our dependency, our need for Christ.

Fasting understood in the light of faith teaches us about answered prayers, about a God who fills our emptiness and satisfies our hunger beyond our greatest imaginings.

And it foreshadows the great feast yet to come, whetting the appetite of all who partake in it for the marriage supper of the Lamb.

That's why Christ's first followers feasted.

They feasted in anticipation of that ultimate feast, and that is why Christians continue to feast.

No matter how grand or humble, every Christian feast is a foreshadowing or more accurately, a foretaste of the heavenly wedding feast.

For even though we can't look on Christ face to face just yet, he is with us.

He is present in the Church.

He is present in the Eucharist.

And where he is present, we feast.

First Christians feasted every Sunday, which they recognized as a little Easter, a memorial of Christ's resurrection.

On that day, they did as Christ commanded.

They remembered him in the breaking of the bread and the blessing of wine.

In that remembering, Jesus came again.His coming was understood as an occasion for feasting, you know, both on the Eucharist and on ordinary food in the Agape Feast, which was a meal the early Christians partook of together, either before or after the Eucharistic breaking of the bread.

Now, over time, the church separated the celebration of the Eucharist and the Agape Feast.

People came together for the Eucharist, then they went back to their homes for a meal.

Sundays, however, always remained little Easters, and even the strictest ascetics broke their penitential fast to enjoy Sunday supper.

Before long, Christians began commemorating other special holy days, such as Easter and Christmas, in a similar manner: liturgically with a mass and privately with a special meal.

The two meals, the Lord's Supper and the family supper, were of a piece.

It's like the higher and holier the liturgical feast, the grander and more elaborate the meal.

Cooking these special meals was and is work.

Cooking for just about any holiday is work.

Just ask any host who prepares Christmas dinner.

All good feasts worth their salt require hours, if not days, in the kitchen, you know, peeling and chopping and stirring and roasting.

They also require weeks of planning, shopping and cleaning and setting the table and decking the halls.

Nevertheless, despite all the work that feasting requires, Christian women and men still have logged countless hours in the kitchen year after year, preparing feast after feast.

And many, or at least some, have logged those hours without complaint.

Quite a few have even logged the hours with joy.

On Easter, on Christmas, on every Sunday of the year, that's what we celebrate.

We celebrate Him, we celebrate with Him, we feast with Jesus Christ and all of heaven rejoicing in God's life, God's love, and God's great gift of Himself to us.

And yes, we celebrate those truths in church.

We celebrate them with liturgy and song and smoky incense that rises up to heaven like a prayer.

But that's not enough.

It's never been enough for a sacramental people.

Every day, on every altar, the bridegroom becomes heavenly food for us.

As such, making our joy in His love and life incarnate through earthly food is the most natural thing in the world.

To pour our time, our energy, our creativity, and our money into preparing special foods on special feasts is simply to imitate Him, who provides us with the most special feast of all.

Moreover, because He gave us His best, on feast days, we give Him our best.

Not Queen Elizabeth's best, but the best our humble selves can manage.

For one person, that might mean a five-course meal for 20.

For someone else, it might mean stirring a bit of meat into a simple soup or stew.

For most Catholics, it's almost always meant pouring wine, beer, or some special drink that stirs the soul to merriment, and it's also almost always meant doing something good with sugar.

Because what's a feast day without dessert?

More important than any fancy foods or fancy dishes, however, are the people doing the feasting.

While minor feast days don't require a crowd, an extra piece of chocolate after lunch will do, the major feasts do require a crowd.

The Marriage Supper of the Lamb is not a supper for one, and Christmas dinner isn't meant to be eaten alone.

Both are meals to share with friends, neighbors, extended family members, and lonely souls in need of a dinner invitation.

The communion of saints feasting in heaven is a dinner crowd without number.

Welcoming others to feast with us images that heavenly feast.

It makes it more fun, and it reminds us that ultimately, we're called to more than a feast.

We are called to communion.