"You're dirty and sweet" - impure for life

My big news this week is that I started my fourth Whole30. I completed one earlier this year, which proved to be transformative for me in every area of my life. I started one at the end of April and stuck with it a little more than half-way before I made a trip on which it proved very difficult to stick with it. So, I abandoned it. In addition to Whole30, this time I am intermittently fasting. This means that I only eat during an 8 hour window each day and do not eat for 16 hours a day. It's not as dramatic as it sounds.

As both of my long-time readers know, I have long been an advocate for fasting. Along with prayer and alms-giving (another word for alms-giving is diakonia- selflessly serving others), fasting is one of the fundamental spiritual disciplines. These disciplines are shared not only by adherents of the so-called "Abrahamic" faiths (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, Islam), they are also disciplines in which adherents to Eastern religions engage. It seems that, at least in prosperous countries, fasting has become the nearly forgotten discipline.

In my view and from a Christian perspective, prayer, fasting, and alms-giving can be correlated to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Prayer corresponds to faith and alms-giving to love. But prayer can become turned in and not result in loving action. Serving others can become disconnected from prayer. So, fasting, which corresponds, to hope connects prayer to alms-giving. The hunger we experience while fasting should remind us of what it is that we really hunger for, what English translations of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount usually translate as "righteousness." In the original Greek, the word is δικαιοσύνην, which transliterates as dikaiosunèn. This word is probably better translated as "justice." Fasting serves justice through hope and is an act of solidarity. I don't mind be repetitive: hope has little-to-nothing to do with optimism.

Fasting is a way to be solidarity with those who do not have enough and with those who are suffering injustice. Both things are true of people, women, children, and men who are being held in detention centers here the U.S., many of which are run by for profit companies.

Fasting enables me to pray with more focus and to serve with more fervor. Fasting 16 hours a day may seem daunting but it really isn't. It amounts to about 3 hours after work and 5 hours in the morning. The remaining 8 hours I am asleep. Just like fasting on nothing but water and perhaps a little coffee for 24 hours or more, I find intermittent fasting energizing, not energy sapping. What saps my energy is overeating and eating poorly. Fasting is proof-positive of the body/soul connection. Fasting feeds my desire.

Wow! That was a lot more than I intended to write about what I am doing. Yesterday was the Memorial of Saint Benedict, founder of cenobitic (i.e., communal, as opposed to hermetical) monasticism. So, this discussion of spiritual disciplines seems somewhat fitting.

I am also reading a biography of Primo Levi that I purchased years ago: Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, by Myriam Anissimov. Levi is a person and a writer whose voice should never be forgotten. Here's a gem from Levi's book The Periodic Table, which is something of an autobiography of his years before being interred in Auschwitz:

the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first [praise of purity], disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered on the second [praise of impurity], which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities in the soil too, as is known, if it is to be fertile

This quote brought to mind of something Philip Roth wrote in Sabbath's Theater, a book I read last January. Like Levi, Roth was Jewish. Roth once visited Levi in Turin for an extended period, during which time he interviewed him. But the quote from Sabbath's Theater Levi's words brought to mind are placed on the lips of Mickey Sabbath, who is an anti-hero if there ever was one: "Whoever imagines himself to be pure is wicked!"

While I hesitate to draw neat or cheap little moral lessons from reality, or even from the Scriptures, which is attempted far too often, I would note that it is because optimism is a poor substitute for hope that it easily and often turns into tragedy. Hope lies beyond your aspirations while optimism is hangs it hat on them.

To bring it around, fasting does not make me pure, or even purer. Neither does fasting kill my desire for food or anything else. It is desire that generates both optimism and hope. The main reason I could never be a Buddhist, or a Stoic for that matter, is that not only do I think desire constitutes my humanity, I am convinced that happiness, contentment, satisfaction lies in the fulfillment of desire, not in its negation. For example, I often think I know what I desire, but usually I don't. This is why I am never more unfulfilled than right after I get what I want. Rather, the things I find satisfying are often things I don't initially want to do.

Sometimes I get in what I call I "a jag." Right now, I am on a bit of an early post-punk, outlaw country jag. So, at the expense of being repetitive, our traditio for this hot summer Friday is Blondie, a vastly underrated band, covering the T-Rex's "Bang a Gong." This is a live performance, great for its raw energy and, yes, its impurities.