Week 1: Fasting
During this first week, we will have a time to contemplate about fasting.
We reach for things all day long. Food, phones, distraction, comfort. Most of the time we don't even notice we're reaching. The hand just moves. the mouth just opens, the scroll just continues.
Fasting interrupts the reach. And in that interruption, something becomes audible: that there's an ache most of us carry. A sense that something is missing, that we're not quite home, that we're reaching for something we can't name. We've been taught to call this ache by different names: sin, fallenness, separation from God. We've been taught that the ache is evidence of our problem. Proof that we need to be fixed.
But what if the ache is a homing signal?
I want to read one of the most-quoted lines in the Bible differently. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." I've always heard that as proof of my failure, as an accusation, a verdict to the immorality of my being. But the original language is softer. "Fall short" means to lack, to be behind, to miss the mark. That's not courtroom language. That's the language of becoming. We haven't yet become what we're meant to be. We lack the glory, the weight, the fullness that is our destiny.
That's ache, not accusation.
I came across this idea years ago and it healed the wound of shame in me. The oldest Christian voices didn't treat sin as a crime to be punished. They treated it as a sickness to be healed. The early church fathers spoke of sin as blindness, bondage, disease. Christ came as healer, not judge. The difference sounds subtle, but it changes everything. One framing sends you to court. The other sends you to a doctor. One asks whether you're guilty. The other asks where it hurts.
The ache isn't evidence that God is angry. It's evidence that we belong somewhere we've wandered from. And we want to come back.
You can feel the difference in your body. One version of the ache makes you feel deficient, like you need to try harder. The other feels like a call. Like something in you knows the way home, you just have to be still enough to hear it.
This is what fasting helps us with. This is how fasting stops being punishment or penance and becomes listening. When the empty stomach isn't a payment but a clearing so that you can hear yourself better. You're not earning anything. You're making room to hear what's been trying to reach you underneath all the reaching.
What am I actually hungry for?
That's the question fasting asks. Not to answer it quickly. Just to let it be present.
Week 1 Session Recording
Lectio Divina Text: Psalm 63:1
O God, you are my God;
I earnestly search for you.
My soul thirsts for you;
my whole body longs for you
in this parched and weary land
where there is no water.
I have seen you in your sanctuary
and gazed upon your power and glory.
Your unfailing love is better than life itself;
how I praise you!
