Fasting from the Perspective of Disability Theology

We are now in the Holy Week, the moment when even those who have not been fasting for the entire Lent might be tempted to give it a try, even for a day. Fasting is so important and so embedded in the Orthodox tradition that the Pan-Orthodox Council gathered in Crete (2016) after almost a century of preparation felt it necessary to issue a document on the topic. According to the document, fasting is a divine commandment, the expression of the Orthodox ascetic ideal, and according to Basil the Great “was prescribed in paradise”. The role of fasting seems to be that of “means of abstinence, repentance, and spiritual edification” (para. 2). So that the Orthodox Church, “like a nurturing Mother” considered it “beneficial for people’s salvation and established the holy periods of fasting” (para. 6).

What remains unclear for me after reading the document is why refraining from eating food is a means to repentance and spiritual edification. Some theories have been proposed already, some by the Fathers themselves, but here I would reflect on this through the lens of my engagement with disability theology and one of its key concepts, vulnerability.

The definition of the word vulnerability is the possibility of being attacked or harmed either physically or emotionally. The focus here is on the negative. When we are vulnerable we can be killed, abused, or broken by others. It is a frightening possibility and the more we go through life, the more we try to hide our vulnerabilities either by trusting a very limited number of people or by avoiding any situation where we imagine or know we can be hurt.

Disability theology, however, insists on the positive aspect of vulnerability, that of being open and ready to take risks. It is often explained that without vulnerability we cannot have any type of relationship with others. Without taking the risk of trusting and being hurt at the end, I will drown in a sea of niceties and have only a superficial knowledge of the other, which in turn will end up making me feel miserable and lonely. A church where people are not vulnerable is just a collection of individuals and not a community. To be vulnerable is to overcome one’s fear and it can be life-giving.

Thomas Reynolds, a theologian who wrote extensively on disability, makes this point splendidly at the end of his book entitled Vulnerable Communion:

All humans are loved into being by God and receive their existence from each other. No one is autonomous and invulnerable. Accepting this brings an attitude of openness and acceptance toward others, who share a common humanity before God. In fact, acknowledged vulnerability can be life-giving. Hence, third, vulnerability facilitates love. This involves implicit solidarity with those who are more vulnerable, not as pity but as creative availability.

What we have here are not two sides of the same coin, but two different experiences clumped under the same label: being in a situation of vulnerability and the feeling of vulnerability. In a situation of vulnerability, where one can actually be harmed, and when the fight, freeze or flight instinct is activated, it becomes hard to take into account the existence of the other. It is much easier to be selfish than generous, even if examples of self-sacrificial solidarity can also be given.

Disability theologians, however, do not speak of these extreme situations; they speak about the feeling of vulnerability that can be experienced in a safe space, such as the church. Feeling vulnerable allows us to find common ground with persons with disabilities, to think of them and us as being in the same ship on the sea of this life that takes us to the safe haven of the Kingdom: sinners dependent on God and fully at God’s providential disposal, lacking control over our own lives. If, by contrast, we enter the Church drawing a line between ‘those vulnerable’ who require care and attention and us, those who are in a position of apparent invulnerability, then communion in its authentic sense is impossible. The best we might get is pity, predicated on the fear that one day you could be in their place.

Here is where fasting can make a difference. The feeling of vulnerability Reynolds mentions is hard to experience with a full stomach. Eating gives us a sense of self-satisfaction, safety, and makes us slower in empathising with the other. Someone who is well-fed and well-dressed begins to feel comfortable, relax, and indulge in pleasures because he or she will think that everything is his or her merit and will almost inevitably feel invulnerable.  

The monastics, who ran away from the world into the Egyptian desert in the first centuries knew this truth very well. The Apophthegmata Patrum, a book recounting their lives and sayings, insists on the importance of fasting to avoid various sinful thoughts.

Abba John said, ‘If a king wishes to subdue a city belonging to enemies, he first of all keeps them without bread and water, and the enemy being in this way harassed by hunger becomes subject unto him; and thus it is in respect of the passions, for if a man endures fasting and hunger regularly, his enemies become stricken with weakness in the soul.’

The role of fasting is thus to make us experience physical hunger, because hunger can make us realise we are weak, vulnerable, and in need of God’s help to resist not only until the end of the day, of the week, of Lent, but until the end of our lives. Feeling physically weak, in a controlled manner, can stimulate the awareness of our vulnerability and make us more open to understanding the value of the other and the need for solidarity as preached by Reynolds. This is not to say that everyone should fast in the same way nor that fasting is necessary for experiencing vulnerability – there are people who feel vulnerable without fasting – but that the logic of fasting is that of breaking down the unsustainable self-trust, the kind of self-trust that healthy and carefree persons can have and that can make them indifferent to the joys and benefits of a vulnerable communion. 

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