Fasting or Eating Really Fast---Part I

            Food and life go together, and changing the former is sure to change the latter, especially when the change in food involves restrictions.  Isaiah clearly points out that fasting does not automatically lead to more virtuous behavior or a more charitable life---sometimes quite the contrary!  In today’s Gospel, the reforming followers of John the Baptist bring their questions about fasting to Jesus, who appears to have introduced a new freedom into the discipline of eating and drinking.

            Of all of the questions people have brought to me both before and after my TMJ surgery, most were worried inquiries about food:  Can you eat? How can you eat?  What can you eat?  Does it all have to be liquefied and pass through a straw?  Will you lose weight?  If I put a plastic splint in my mouth for several months, can I lose weight too?  And so on . . .

            Leading up to the surgery, I deliberately avoided thinking about food questions, because I thought that the practical answers would only emerge from the day to day negotiations of my post-surgical life.

            My “last supper” was a wonderful one.  My parents had arrived the day before, and we met up with Judy and Larry Garatoni (who would be taking care of me after the surgery).  Together we dined at a Columbian restaurant on the great pier of St. Petersburg, in a building that looked like an upside down Mayan temple dropped from outer space.  An odd place for odd circumstances; everything did feel all turned upside down.

            My final meal before surgery and its ensuing restrictions was oddly small and simple.  Given what I was facing, I didn’t really have the appetite for anything greater.  I was more interested, rather, in talking as much as I could, even to the point of my mouth becoming sore (the joints had deteriorated by this time to the point at which extended speaking had become painful). 

            I thought of the connection between feeding on food and feasting on meaning.  The stories we shared at table were so obviously the main course, and what we ordered on the menu was utterly subordinate to it. 

            And then began the little eight or nine hour “fast” before surgery.  My last food and drink that evening was actually the Eucharist, celebrated by me alone (except for the angels and saints) in my hotel room.  This sacrificial banquet was so infinitely small and great simultaneously.

            On the day of the surgery, in the pre-operative ward, having already been hooked up to the IV solutions which would keep me going for nutrition and hydration, I was eventually joined by my parents and the Garatoni’s.  I had deliberately saved a particular extended conversation for this morning:  The pressing and desperate necessity of providing “spiritual food”---which is to say communicated meaning about the most important things---to patients in hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices. 

            In my priestly experience, it is precisely in these places where people enter a desert wasteland utterly devoid of food for prayer and even substantive reflection on their lives.  Their material needs are often provided for, and all of the physical details are minutely “managed,” but people in these situations are literally starved for good ruminative understanding of how their changed (even endangered lives) are held and prospectively healed in the “big picture” of Christ.

            For several days after surgery I endured a wretched succession of protein drinks (Boost, Ensure, etc.), all combined with nauseating (and anti-nausea!) medications that reduced eating and drinking to its most “primitively technological.”  My remaining eating adventures will be continued in a future blog post (perhaps every Lenten Friday will be a meditation on food). 

            But I now understand better why Jesus could walk around Galilee with his followers as a Bridegroom announcing a Wedding Banquet.  The crowds listened to Him as they willingly missed a meal or two (What did the Apostles say:  Let the crowds go, it is late, so that they can buy food for themselves . . .).  They perhaps didn’t quite fully realize that Christ was feeding them---the comestible miracles like the multiplication of loaves and fishes were actually the serving of dessert, so to speak. 

            I also suspect that the Apostles learned that their fasting was governed less by the dietary codes of the Pharisees and more by the evangelical mission into which the Lord Jesus was initiating them.  After all, it is virtually impossible to eat on one’s own timetable when surrounded by crowds with pressing needs.  The Apostles at times had to feel that they themselves were the ones being consumed by the hungry, thirsty multitudes. 

            That nutrition and hydration can be fitted to the demands of a medical intervention sheds abundant light on how our eating and drinking as Christians must be governed by the mission the Lord gives us.  When it comes to our alternating fasting and feasting, Christ Himself is both the measure and the meal.