It's been a week now, and the headache has subsided. My tea and coffee fast is going ok. I'm not enjoying it, but that's kind of the point of fasting. If you give something up you're not bothered about, it has little meaning. You're also not supposed to make a big deal of it in front of others: Jesus says, if you do, you have already received your reward. In other words, you've impressed people, but you haven't impressed God. At this point, I am hoping that God understands that when I tell the Internet about my caffeine fast I am not so much bragging as externally processing my thoughts, which is what we extroverts do, I'm afraid.
I had a very interesting conversation about Lent in the church coffee shop yesterday. A Christian colleague explained that, rather than give something up, she chooses something she enjoys, such as cake, and puts money in a jar every time she eats it during Lent. That way she can give the money she's put aside to a charity and hence the Lenten discipline becomes a positive act rather than a giving up. I think this is a great idea and I might try it next year. Lots of people have started to emphasise 'taking up' rather than 'giving up' in Lent. It makes more sense to some people to do something positive than to deny yourself chocolate for a few weeks. I have been remembering the wonderful film Chocolat, based on the novel by Joanne Harris, in which a domineering, emotionally repressed mayor imposes a strict Lenten fast on a whole French town. There is to be absolutely no fun during Lent, and certainly no visits to the new chocolate shop. This film/book presents the Lenten fast as a pointless act of life-denying religiosity. Only repressed people deny themselves food/fun/sex (they are all bound up together in the book).
I remember a session on spirituality at college where our tutor told us a story about the 4th century desert fathers - only, I realise now that I remembered it wrong. In my memory, two men go to the monastery and ask the desert fathers (very holy monks who devoted their whole lives to communion with God) to help them in their spiritual lives. One of the fathers sits with one of the men in complete silence for a long time. Afterwards, they go outside and the man sees his friend sitting in a boat with the other father eating honey cakes. This seems rather unfair to him, but the father explains, "You needed silence; he needed honey cakes." I am someone who has no problem at all with having fun, eating food, talking a lot and being very busy. I have a great deal of difficulty when any of that is taken away. I am not good at self-denial. So while for others it may be quite appropriate for them to 'take something up for Lent', I could do with going without honey cakes for a while.
However, when I googled this story to check the details, it was quite different from my memory. There is only one visitor, and he observes the two desert fathers in their very different spiritualities. One, Abba Arsenius, sits in complete silence; the other, Abba Moses, enjoys good company and conversation. When the visitor goes to God in prayer, puzzled by these two very different approaches, he is given a vision of the two men each sitting in a boat on the river. Abba Arsenius is sitting with the Holy Spirit in complete silence. Abba Moses is eating honey cakes with the angels. I remembered it as a story about how we need different things at different times, and I assumed that we would need the thing which comes less easily to us. I was wrong, however: it is actually a story about how we all commune with God in different ways. Now I wonder whether my struggle with any kind of discipline is perhaps something God can work with, rather than something I need always to fight against. Nevertheless, I want to stretch myself by going without this Lent, and it will be interesting to see what happens.
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