Fasting and faith

BRENDAN McCARTHY

Spiritual hunger
From this holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims are required to refrain from food and drink during daylight hours, to Catholics abstaining from meat on Fridays, fasting has long had religious connections. Could even the fashionable 5:2 fasting diet have such a dimension?
ts lunchtime. But today I am trying not to eat. Can I make it to evening without a bite? Better one half-decent meal later than breaking the day with two flimsy snacks? Im peckish, a little on edge, and have the beginnings of a headache. Whatever I decide, I cant have more than 600 calories between now and breakfast time tomorrow. Maybe a satsuma and a black coffee? A few vine tomatoes, a piece of lettuce and a cracker? Surely this cant add up to more than 100 calories? I go and check the food tables on my iPad. Im on the so-called 5:2 Diet, wildly popular since Dr Michael Mosleys documentary Eat, Fast and Live Longer for BBC2s science series Horizon. The rules are attractively simple. For two days a week you stick to 500 calories if you are a woman, 600 for a man. On the other five days you forget about dieting and eat as you normally do. The promised rewards are huge: weight loss; fall in cholesterol; reduced risk of cancer, diabetes and Alzheimers; and increased life expectancy. During Americas Great Depression when people ate less, life expectancy greatly increased. And in the Catholic world theres some evidence that monks and nuns (who presumably eat more simply than most) outlive the general population. In our family the 5:2 Diet, for whose benefits there is decent scientific evidence, has become the new kosher. I fast on Mondays and Thursdays. Suzie, my wife, more determined than me, fasts on three or even four days a week. In this she is truer to the spirit of the science used to justify the diet; that alternative-day fasting (and not just on two days a week) has radical and long-lasting benefits. On what days will I fast? Those on which I am busiest and least likely to think about food, Ive decided. Not since my childhood has fasting been such a prominent part of my landscape. I am of an age to remember the old catechism answer about the conditions for receiving Communion: We must be in the state of grace, be fasting from midnight, and have the right intention. Catholic life at the time was choreographed around this hard condition. People received Communion at early Masses only (if they did at all). Newlyweds (my parents among them) married in the mornings and went with their guests to a wedding breakfast. The fast was an added practical incentive to attend 6
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Midnight Mass at Christmas and Easter rather than wait for the morning. Ive been on the diet for 10 weeks or so and I am losing weight (although not yet where I would most like). Already Ive realised that I am putting my body through a harsher regime than the Church ever demands on a fast day. Good Friday would be a doddle after this. And it doesnt begin to compare with Islams Ramadan fast (no food or drink from sunrise to sunset; harsh in these northerly latitudes 16 hours every day this week in London and almost an hour longer in Scotland). My wife helpfully suggested to a Muslim colleague at work that it was the perfect time for her to start the 5:2. She got a dusty answer. Over the years, Ive mostly done as the Church asked on fast days and I follow the

English bishops request that Catholics not eat meat on Fridays. Last Sunday over coffee after Mass, several of my friends and I discussed Friday abstinence; we agreed that it was largely meaningless to us and a failed attempt at Catholic identity politics. Of course Friday abstinence in the Catholic world tends to be rendered as fish on Fridays. When I was growing up in West Clare, this often meant my grandfather arriving home with a salmon or sea bass (or even a lobster) caught that morning. The bishops statement at the time of the reintroduction of the Friday obligation remarked that the best habits are those which are acquired as part of a common resolve and common witness. This ignored some basic realities of modern weekday eating; that its less a matter of common witness than of serial grazing.

In reality, fast and abstinence are not very rigorous in the Catholic tradition. To a determined dieter, the online Catholic Encyclopaedias entry on fasting reads as positively lax, laced as it is with all manner of softening exceptions. And it finishes: No student of ecclesiastical discipline can fail to perceive that the obligation of fasting is rarely observed in its integrity nowadays. Perhaps this isnt very surprising. Our faith has a meal at its centre. Our instincts are communal and eating, as in Jewish tradition, is at its highest a ritual of sharing. Dieting, skimping, doing without, is a solitary act and Mosleys Horizon programme with its images of lean American bodies, American science and virtuoso fasters is flecked with Puritanism. My 5:2 motives are partly about health and partly narcissistic. I know I wont have an athletes body again but Id like to come a little close to it. What I have begun to wonder (particularly with my thoughts on Good Friday in mind) is this: whether fasting can have the same ascetic meaning today as it once did? What if fasting isnt particularly mortifying (as in the Catholic Encyclopaedia again training the soul to virtuous and holy living)? I dont have an easy answer. I do know that the hardest form of mortification for me is the giving of my attention to someone when I dont particularly feel like giving it of being present, or (dread phrase) in the moment. For me a fasting day heightens this problem of attention with its longueurs worldly equivalents of monasticisms noon-day devils that make me restless and edgy. Id rather be in the office, with other people, or in a cinema, than have time hang heavy at home (from where I mostly work). If Im pushed to a further point of honesty, Id admit that food is often for me a form of displacement activity, a reason to postpone something I really should do, be it a piece of writing or a difficult phone call. When I am animated by something, I can spend many hours on it, mindless of how little I may have eaten. Food is a litmus test of my emotional life; when Im eating too much, something is wrong. Perhaps the 5:2, without my intending it so, is pressing this strongly to the front of my mind. My fasting hasnt a scintilla of religious intent about it, but without my meaning it to, it may be raising questions which begin to be religious.

27 July 2013