We are becoming partakers of the divine nature. But as we saw last time, this is not something that happens automatically; rather, God has given us the power to choose — to do or not do — so we may participate in what we are becoming; so we may work together with the Holy Spirit to partake of the divine nature more and more as we grow in faith and holiness.
Another way to say this, is that we must exercise ourselves in the divine nature, in order to put it on. We can never do this under our own power, of course — but we cooperate with God as he gives us Christ through his Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, this cooperation is hard work. It is not passive.
In the modern day, thanks to our being made weak and lazy through the choice and convenience of consumerism, cooperating with the Spirit feels extremely taxing. Our flesh will always choose short-term fun over long-term fulfillment — and choice and convenience have trained us to do this reflexively, by giving us no end of opportunities for it.
What I primarily focused on last time was how the consumer-oriented world tempts us into a covetous, impatient, miserable mindset. It shapes us to always desire more, and to never be satisfied with what we have — which is to say, it shapes us to embody the pattern of the fall. Adam and Eve were dissatisfied and discontent with having only all the trees but one; they wanted the wisdom of the tree of knowledge now — and so they took it. Sin is foolishness — it wants short-term gain for long-term loss. But the pattern of redemption, predictably enough, is the opposite. Satan offered Jesus kingship now — and Jesus refused.
Then Jesus was led up to the wilderness by the Spirit, to be tempted by the Devil, and having fasted forty days and forty nights, afterwards he hungered. And the Tempter having come to him said, “If the Son thou art of God, speak, that these stones may become loaves.” But he, answering, said, “It hath been written, ‘Not upon bread alone doth man live, but upon every word coming forth from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:1–4)
Righteousness is wisdom — it prefers short-term loss for long-term gain.
Having been shaped into covetous, short-term patterns of fun over fulfillment, we find it pretty hard to feel fulfilled. I think it is unquestionably true that modern Christians easily get stuck in a cycle of miserable pleasure-seeking, rather than cultivating true contentment and happiness in Christ.
What makes this such a difficult problem to overcome is that being shaped in this consumeristic way creates a vicious cycle: we continually become more blind to the way out, and more depleted of the willpower to take it.
Consumerism promises excitement and entertainment and happiness; it promises to make us fulfilled and inspired and motivated. But what it actually delivers is boredom and lethargy and depression; it makes us listless and fruitless and — in the words of 2 Peter — inert.
This makes it extremely hard to think clearly about how to escape — or even want to escape…let alone take the action necessary to escape.
Because we have become conditioned to always satisfy every longing and craving, by giving in to them, we find ourselves like prisoners whose muscles have atrophied and wasted away from being in shackles so long. When we quickly give in to every urge, we become enslaved to our urges, and ruled by them — and we get weaker, as they get stronger.
To give you just one example, I can tell you from sad experience that a young man who indulges the desire to eat as much chocolate as he can every once in a while, soon becomes a young man who routinely indulges that desire more and more often, and in greater and greater amounts, until he is eating a block of chocolate nearly every day, and eventually is no longer satisfied with just one block, but buys two so that he has a little extra for later, and then over time expects to eat both blocks all at once if he is to enjoy himself at all, until he is several sacks of potatoes heavier than he should be, and is incapable of saying no to chocolate, or even sharing it with anyone — and yet in all that time he does not grow to enjoy chocolate more, but less.
So what is the alternative?
Indulging our desires does not work — so presumably refusing to indulge them will…right? When a man realizes that he is becoming a glutton, and eating too much, and getting fat, then he should veer out of that ditch and stop eating anything?
Asceticism is no better than indulgence
Well, that does not work either. If I may repurpose an analogy that Jesus uses for a slightly different cause, think of the parable of the man with the demon:
The unclean spirit, when he is gone out of the man, passeth through waterless places, seeking rest, and findeth it not. Then he saith, “I will return into my house whence I came out;” and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he goeth, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man becometh worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this evil generation. (Matthew 12:43–45)
Now this is not ultimately speaking of a man being exorcised; the man in the story is explicitly identified with Israel of Jesus’ time. Yet what is true of the corporate body is true of the individual — and that on more than one level. We can speak (and scripture does speak) of a man being possessed of a spirit of gluttony, for example, without meaning that there is a demonic agent — an immaterial person — who has entered into him and controls his appetite for food. I am not denying that such a thing can happen, but there are much more mundane things that the same language can refer to: a man may be possessed of a gluttonous spirit in the sense that he embodies gluttony — he participates in the pattern of gluttony — by overeating; by overindulging his longing for food. And when he realizes this, and decides he does not like what he is becoming (or at least feels sufficiently ill), he may decide that he is going to stop eating like that for a while. He will go on a diet.
So he suffers through restricting his eating for a time. He abstains from chocolate, perhaps. The spirit of gluttony is driven out. There is no longer a place for it in his body; he will no longer embody that spirit. Symbolically speaking, the spirit of gluttony passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding it not. There is nowhere for it — for a while.
But then what happens?
Well, he decides he has done enough. He has driven out the spirit, has he not? He has proved that he is not a glutton; or at least, that he isn’t one any more. He has turned himself around. He does not need that chocolate; he is capable of restraining himself. But it is unnatural to eat so little for so long, and so he returns to eating — and immediately, the spirit returns also. He falls back into his old ways. The dog returns to his vomit, and the filthy piggie, having washed itself, returns to the muck. And so often, he ends up worse off than before, as new vices beset him. The spirit of gluttony is increased sevenfold; or he adds to it some new vice that, in some other way, makes his latter state worse than the former.
This is a miserable way of being.
I use the example of food because it is so clear — no doubt you are aware that many a man who goes on a diet loses weight for a month or two, and then puts it all back on…plus some. He ends up fatter than before. Truly his last state becometh worse than his first.
Why does this happen to him? Jesus tells us: because when the spirit returns, it finds him empty and inviting. There is no other spirit living within him; what, then, prevents its return?
To put it more plainly — if we cut out the symbolic circumlocution — the man still wants food; and he hasn’t set his mind on embodying anything greater than food during the time he was abstaining. So as soon as the food is available again, he returns straight to placing it at the head of his desires. And this is true, of course, for all kinds of things — whether it is indulging our appetite for food, or for stories, or for trivia, or for social recognition, or for laughter, or for news, or for sexy women, or for controversy, or for gossip, or for cars, or for equipment. Whatever it is that scratches the itch and keeps us preoccupied, busy, feeling. The longing of the flesh, the longing of the eyes, and the ostentation of life (1 Jn 2:16).
Abstaining from a thing does not tend to reduce our desire for it, any more than indulging in it does. On the contrary, it frequently increases our desire. When you do not eat, you get hungrier. Or, to use a more troubling example, when you don’t use your phone, you get bored, and are more inclined to pick it up. Sometimes it is such a powerful compulsion that you cannot help yourself. Hence Paul says that asceticism, the denial of the body, has indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship, and humble-mindedness, and severity to the body; but is of no value against the indulgence of the flesh (Colossians 2:23).
How could it be — for it does not diminish, but rather inflames, the desires of the flesh to be indulged?
Natural versus artificial longings
Now, at this point I should make a distinction. There is an important difference between the appetite we have for food, and the appetite we have for checking our phone. One is natural, and the other isn’t. One is never going to go away, while the other would — if the power grid went down, and we all had to go back to farming with our hands and living like our ancestors did. I know, it’s hard to believe, but I guarantee within a week you wouldn’t be thinking about your phone any more, except for how sad you are that you never bothered to save any PDFs about how to make a windmill or a hand pump, or always assumed that if you ever needed to identify edible mushrooms you’d have access to the internet. But the desire to check your notifications wouldn’t exist any more.
The desire to eat food would.
We have natural longings, built into us because they directly serve the telos of our natures; and we have artificial longings, built on top of these natural longings by social and technological pressures.
Notice that the artificial longings are not fabricated out of nothing — they are based in natural longings. We naturally long for social inclusion and recognition — that is why you can make someone check their phone 205 times a day. If they had no natural longing to exploit, they would have no reason to check the phone. And it may seem strange, but the artificial longings are actually more powerful and harder to satisfy than the natural ones. For instance, if you know anything about B.F. Skinner and his ambivalent relationship with pigeons, you will probably remember that he discovered that they are very interested in food — and therefore very interested in the click of a food dispenser. But while they would stop seeking food when their bellies were full, they took far longer to get tired of hearing the food dispenser click. The artificial longing for the food dispenser was stronger and longer-lasting than their natural desire for food.
We are not very different from pigeons. Well, actually we are much worse. Think of how often you have seen a whole bunch of people trying to make the “food dispenser” click, while they ignore the actual “food” right in front of them. How many people you have seen indulging the artificially-conditioned desire to check their phones, while they are literally sitting together at a table of other people who are ready and able to give them the social recognition they’re looking for, in real life, at that very moment?
You can go to any restaurant and see an entire family sitting around the same table, eating alone.
I think it is important to recognize this distinction between natural and artificial longings, because the latter are more enslaving than the former, and therefore may need to be dealt with more severely — and even cut off entirely sometimes. It can occasionally be necessary, I think, to remove a source of artificial longing, so that we can properly exercise and restore the natural longing on which it is based. Sometimes an artificial longing is actually wicked, as is the case with something like porn. But sometimes it just inclines us to a wicked neglect of the natural longing that it relies on. It becomes like a parasite, feeding on the natural longing without actually fulfilling it. Video games often fall into this category for men, who want the effortless, vicarious participation in highly-skilled dominion over a virtual world — rather than the real participation in real dominion over the real world…which is also real tiring and real difficult.
I would like to keep this distinction in the back of our minds, between natural and artificial longings, but move forward to ask what scripture says about how to rightly order our longings in general. Whatever it says about natural longings can probably be applied to artificial ones, even if we must apply that advice more strictly. We have seen that indulging our desires does not work; and we have seen that abstaining from our desires does not work. Both tend to inflame them further, rather than increase our self-control. When we pig out, our appetites grow out of control and enslave us; and when we diet, our appetites seem controlled for a while, but then spring back stronger than ever, and enslave us anyway.
So what are we to do? What is the alternative?
Fasting versus dieting
Scripture’s answer is, in part, fasting. And here we must draw a critical distinction.
A fast is not a diet.
Both its purpose, and its method, are different: a diet is restraining one particular appetite — almost always food — and almost always for reasons that are focused on ourselves. People generally diet because they do not like how they look; they do not like that they have become unhealthy; they recognize that they need to lose weight. None of this is necessarily bad. It can be mere vanity, but it can also be a sincere effort to repent of sin and turn toward virtue. But it is a shallow effort. It is the kind of effort that seems natural to someone who has been shaped by consumerism.
Even our solutions to consumerism are consumeristic. You choose your diet from all the possible options. You pick the one that is most convenient. You want it to be tailored to you. Most of all, it must be about what you want. You want to be thin. You want to look good in the mirror. You want to stave off diabetes and early-onset dementia. You want more self-control. You want to become someone who eats well.
But this is the attitude of the hypocrites to fasting.
And when ye may fast, be ye not as the hypocrites, looking sad, for they make their faces unshowable, that they may be shown forth to men as fasting; truly I say to you that they have their reward. (Matthew 6:16)
You could say they are not really fasting; they are doing a glamor diet. A vanity show, so people will know how virtuous they are. Look at how they afflict themselves!
Truly they have had their reward.
But a fast — a true fast — is not like this. This is the point of Jesus’ instruction to his disciples.
But thou, fasting, anoint thy head, and wash thy face, that thou mayest not show forth to men as fasting, but to thy Father who is in secret; and thy Father, who seeth in secret, shall reward thee. (Matthew 6:17–18)
A fast is not focused on a single appetite, and even more importantly, it is not focused on you. It is not something you do for bodily benefit, or for social recognition. Not that bodily benefit is of no use — of course, Paul tells us that bodily exercise, of which fasting is certainly a kind, is profitable for a little. But the point of fasting is not focused on bodily exercise, but rather on piety, which is profitable for all things.
exercise thyself unto piety: for bodily exercise is profitable for a little; but piety is profitable for all things, having promise of the life which now is, and of that which is to come. (1 Timothy 4:7–8)
You fast for God — not for man (which includes yourself). You are seeking the reward of closer participation in the divine nature; fasting is the means by which you do this.
How, though? How does fasting do this, and why does it do this when dieting doesn’t?
Well, look at how Jesus explains it to Satan: “Not upon bread alone doth man live, but upon every word coming forth from the mouth of God.” This explains the purpose of fasting in Jesus’ mind. Why not eat? Why not make the stones into bread? Because the reason for fasting in the first place is to remind the soul that there is something more important than physical food — there is spiritual food. If there is physical food, there is also spiritual food (cf. 1 Cor 15:44). The idea of fasting is not to deny the body so that it will somehow learn to stop needing food. You are not trying to turn off the body. Rather, you are using the suffering of the body as it longs for food as a way to remind yourself of what food really is. You are denying your body for the purpose of directing its longings toward the true end which they symbolize. The physical images the spiritual, and our need for food means something:
…his disciples were asking him, saying, “Rabbi, eat;” and he said to them, “I have food to eat that ye have not known.” The disciples then said one to another, “Did any one bring him anything to eat?” Jesus saith to them, “My food is that I may do the will of him who sent me, and may finish his work.” (John 4:31–34)
In other words, Jesus turns away from physical food, that he might be more acutely aware of its true meaning, its true fulfillment — and the true importance of that. He heightens the needs of his body, so that what they express — the need for God — is similarly heightened. Fasting is the antidote to the spiritual affliction caused by excessive ease, excessive gratification, which God warns the Israelites about as they are preparing to enter the promised land:
Take heed to thyself, lest thou forget Yahweh thy god so as not to keep his commands, and his judgments, and his statutes which I am commanding thee today; lest thou eat, and hast been satisfied…all that is thine be multiplied, and thy heart hath been lifted up, and thou hast forgotten Yahweh thy God. (Deuteronomy 8:11–14)
Our physical needs are designed to teach us about our spiritual needs. So when our physical needs are met, and we are physically at ease, it is natural to become spiritually at ease also. When our physical senses are indulged, they become dulled, and our spiritual senses become dulled also.
Think what a great danger this is in the modern day, when we have so much more than the simple kinds of wealth that God warned the Israelites would cause them to forget him!
Our senses are not just indulged, but glutted; and this overstimulation does not cause greater sensitivity, but rather numbness — and so we become not merely physically numb, but spiritually also.
Afflicting the soul
Hence, God calls the Israelites to assemble once every year, on Yom Kippur, to afflict their souls, and humble themselves before him, and remember their need for him:
And on the tenth of this seventh month a holy convocation ye shall have, and ye shall afflict your souls; ye do no work (Numbers 29:7)
Afflicting one’s soul refers to a fast; see for instance the use of the same phrase in Psalm 35:13:
And I—in their sickness, my clothing was sackcloth, I afflicted with fastings my soul, and prayed with head bowed on my chest.
We also see here that fasting and prayer go together — as they do when Ezra is leading the Israelites back to the promised land from the exile in Persia:
Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might afflict ourselves before our God, to seek of him a straight way for us, and for our little ones, and for all our substance. (Ezra 8:21)
Fasting is always about seeking God, which is why it is combined with prayer. These are a natural pairing; if you are fasting, of course you are praying. Seeking God is the whole point. Hence we read, for instance, of Paul and Barnabas, that
having appointed to them by vote elders in every assembly, having prayed with fastings, they commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed. (Acts 14:23)
While we see in these passages that fasting is especially appropriate for particular times and seasons, to bring specific needs before God, Jesus’ instructions about it indicate that it ought to be a regular practice. He tells us that when we fast, we should not be like the hypocrites — not meaning that we should not fast as often as them, but that we should not make a show of it. Well which hypocrites does he mean? We know that the chief object of his critiques are always the scribes and Pharisees. “Woe you, scribes and Pharisees — hypocrites!” And we know how often they fasted, do we not? Yes we do:
the Pharisee having stood by himself, thus prayed: “God, I thank thee that I am not as the rest of men, rapacious, unrighteous, adulterers, or even as this tax-collector; I fast twice in the week.” (Luke 18:11–12)
Am I saying that Jesus is implying we must fast twice a week? I am saying that he is implying we should fast regularly and often — because we need to seek God regularly and often. Scripture is plain that the way to cultivate piety is through normal use of our natural appetites and longings — combined with regular and not infrequent fasting to refocus our attention especially on God.
I also mentioned before that fasting refers to more than merely food. Since the purpose is to seek God, fasting is a turning away from all our bodily longings — all the natural desires we experience, all the sensory stimulation we crave, all the distractions that compete for our attention; everything which sets us at ease, or makes us forgetful of God. Think of the counsel Paul gives married couples:
Defraud not each other, except by consent for a time, that ye may be free for prayer; and again may come together, that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of control. (1 Corinthians 7:5)
Here is the biblical pattern in a nutshell. The aim is not to cultivate greater self-control through continual fasting — for fasting will test your self-control and place you under greater temptation. Rather, the aim is to make proper use of your natural longings at most times — in this case the longing for marital intimacy — while some times fasting for the purpose of devoting yourself to prayer, re-focusing yourself on God, and, in the words of Psalm 62, being still before him.
Fasting and rest
If you are thinking in patterns, as I hope you are by now, you may notice that the way scripture speaks of fasting looks a lot like a sabbath pattern. Yet this seems paradoxical, because the sabbath is a feast day. But remember, the sabbath is also a fast day, because you rest from your work. Fasting is a broader pattern that, oddly, can include feasting. You can fast from work by feasting, or you can fast from food by…fasting.
The reason I mention this, though, is because understanding fasting as a sabbath pattern helps us to answer some practical questions. For instance, most people tend to think that fasting requires not eating all day. But they don’t tend to think of fasting as meaning that you shouldn’t work all day. Yet biblically, you could fast just as effectively by focusing on not working, as not eating. And it need not be for a day or days at a time — it could simply be a short time, an hour or two. Moreover, if you are turning away from all your regular habits and routines in order to better seek God through that contrast, then it makes sense to even apply the idea of the waterless places, the desert wilderness, that the unclean spirit passes through, in a fairly literal way. Think of how Jesus establishes a fasting pattern with his disciples:
“Come ye yourselves apart to a desert place, and rest a little” — for those coming and those going were many, and they had no opporunity even to eat (Mark 6:31)
Indeed, you notice that the more the burden of his mission weighs upon him — the more overstimulated he gets, you might say — the more time Jesus deliberately makes for fasting from his work:
but the more was the report going abroad concerning him, and great multitudes were coming together to hear, and to be healed by him of their infirmities, and he was withdrawing himself in the desert places and was praying. (Luke 5:15–16)
Fasting is a retreat to the wilderness. A retreat to the desert. That is where God meets Moses. That is where Jesus goes to seek God, away from the crowds and the world. And in the Christian tradition, that is where the holy men went, who were especially known for fasting. I do not necessarily commend the desert fathers as entirely reliable guides; I think they took asceticism and denial of the body rather too far, and veered more into the sorts of practices we see in pagan religions like Hinduism. But they were seeking to be faithful to a real biblical pattern that really can inform our own lives. When we think about fasting, we should be thinking in terms of retreat from our regular worlds, from our regular habits, for the purpose of seeking and serving God. For instance, fasting traditionally goes along with alms-giving, as well as prayer. You give up your food for those who have none. As Isaiah says, God does not desire that we afflict ourselves for affliction’s sake, but for the sake of becoming more like him, and establishing his heavenly patterns more fully in the earth:
Is such the fast that I choose? The day of a man’s afflicting his soul? To bow his head as a reed, and spread out sackcloth and ashes? This callest thou a fast, and a desirable day to Yahweh? Is not this the fast that I chose— to loose the bands of wickedness, to shake off the burdens of the yoke, and to send out the oppressed free, and every yoke ye draw off? Is it not to deal to the hungry thy bread, and the mourning poor bring home, that thou seest the naked and cover him, and from thine own flesh hide not thyself? (Isaiah 58:5–7)
Fasting, in other words, is breaking from our regular and necessary pattern of serving ourselves and our own bodies — which is good in its place — to put it in its place by seeking God instead.
Fasting, meaning, and happiness
This makes it a matter of urgent importance for us today. I would say that if there were only one practice we should focus on recovering to counteract the effect of the world on our hearts and minds — to break the power of devices over our affections, of entertainment over our longings, to thwart the powerful pull of social media and YouTube — it must be fasting.
I am not saying that the church today has forgotten God because it has forgotten how to fast — but it is impossible to deny the correlation between consumer culture and the impotence of God’s people. And it is impossible to deny that the straightforward solution that scripture gives to consumerism is fasting.
Nor do I want you to think this is purely a practical matter of breaking an addiction. I do think fasting is a great help for dealing with the enslavement that comes from consumerism — but that is almost a secondary issue compared to the deeper spiritual problems that come along with that enslavement. Think again of Jesus saying he has food to eat which his disciples do not know — the food of doing his Father’s work. His fasting is a way of focusing on true food, which is spiritually discerned. And think again of how God warns the Israelites not to forget him when they grow fat, and not to think that they gained their riches by their own hand. The way to avoid such forgetfulness is established in the fast of Yom Kippur; which of course should be observed and replicated as a fractal pattern throughout an Israelite’s daily liturgy, his daily habits.
In other words, scripture gives fasting as the solution to a particular problem — and that problem is what you might call the breakdown of meaning: the disconnection between how you interpret your life, and what your life is supposed to mean.
When you fail to set aside due time to “reconnect” with God, so to speak, you start to get a skewed perspective on life; you start to forget and misinterpret all the physical meaning in your life — and over time, this will set you on the road to hell. The hierarchy of meaning starts to disintegrate, because it is no longer being tethered to God and set back in order. This is what fasting does. As Tim Nichols says:
The problem is internal: the Creator has gifted you a meaningful life in a meaningful world, and you have failed to see any meaning in it. The corresponding solution must also be internal: you need eyes to see the meaning that is already there, all around you.
The way that you do this is through fasting. Paradoxically, this is most exemplified and fulfilled in Lord’s Day worship, as you fast from the rest of your life by feasting with God. But Lord’s Day worship is not sufficient if you are not taking the same pattern out into that “rest of your life.” If the pattern of fasting or sabbath does not flow down into all of your habits, into your daily liturgy, then what is the use of it? What have you learned?
Let me return to where I began, so I can connect fasting to the main problem I have already identified. In the last couple of issues, I have been indirectly angling toward a biblical doctrine of happiness. The modern world is characterized by boredom and lethargy and depression; we are listless and fruitless and inert — we are unhappy. And I believe it is clear that this is caused very largely by covetousness: by consumer culture; by choice and convenience.
Now I trust you can see just on the surface how fasting is the natural antidote to that. It is the opposite of consumerism. It is refusing to consume, for the purpose of more directly consuming God. It is thus the solution to the boredom, the misery, the lack of purpose and direction inherent in consumerism.
All of these things are really just a form of meaninglessness: a breakdown of meaning.
Why do you compulsively check your phone? Because you have no meaning in that moment. You are searching for some meaning, something purposeful, because you feel empty. You are so unaccustomed to being alone with your thoughts, just you and God, or having to formulate some meaning of your own, that you just automatically, almost desperately, seek out meaning from your device. But all you will find there is more meaninglessness. Nothing you are seeking there can have the value to hold your attention. It may be stimulating you, but it is not adding value to you; it is not moving you toward God; it is not directing you upward; it is not connecting you with anything good, true, or beautiful.
It is doing the opposite.
The only answer to this is the true meaning found in God. And the way that scripture gives us to ensure that we are properly set upon this meaning…is fasting. Resetting ourselves by casting aside all the less meaningful things, all the distractions, all the stimulations — and fixing our attention on God. “Only, for God be silent, O my soul” (Psalm 62:5). As the hymn says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
I am not sure that most people today are really capable of such silence and stillness. I think we find it extremely difficult. Our minds are not trained to it. It sounds boring — because we have come to equate boredom with a lack of stimulation, rather than a lack of meaning.
But if boredom really is a lack of meaning, we are actually only making ourselves more bored by being unable to do something as simple and practical as fasting.
I have already shown that how scripture speaks of happiness is directly correlated with meaning; happiness comes from the ability to discern the good purposes even in the bad experiences:
So let me suggest to you then, that the opposite of happiness, scripturally speaking, is not so much sadness as meaningless.
Or, to put it slightly differently, hopelessness. Think of how Paul describes pagans as “having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). Does this not describe our generation? Are we not of all people the most hopeless — despite having the most stuff constantly going on?
We are hopeless because we live in a world where nothing seems to matter. We are constantly fixing our attention on trivialities; we feel out of control. We have no sense of place, because we are dissipated into the ethereal space of the internet; and we have no sense of identity, because we focus more of ourselves into names on a screen than the people in our own lives. And on top of that, nothing we do seems to matter, to us or anyone else, because it all either takes place online, or when it takes place in real life, everyone else is online and doesn’t notice.
Having our focus in all kinds of unreal “places,” and on all kinds of things we can’t control, happening thousands of miles away, makes us feel helpless and hopeless.
Yet we keep making the problem worse by doubling down on all the habits that got us here — until we cannot rest at all. We cannot be still. We cannot sit without checking for notifications. We cannot relax without wanting some busy-work to feel productive.
We are aggressively amusing ourselves to death.
And the answer to all of this — I don’t say the only answer, but a very significant biblical answer — is fasting.
Until next time,
Bnonn