The Early Church Fathers and ascetics speak often of the need for fasting and abstinence as practices of self-mortification and self-denial, in hopes of growing in virtue. Fasting is one of the greatest spiritual weapons that we have at our disposal, and it helps greatly to bring clarity to the mind and purify us from habitual sins. As beings who are both body and soul, fasting calls us to pray in an embodied way, subjecting the body to experiencing longing and hunger in a way that creates an emptiness that we ask God to fill. When we are able to rightly order our passions with the help of God’s grace, we become free to live in harmony with God’s Will and pursue growth in the virtues. St. Paul speaks on the necessity of rightly ordering the passions numerous times in his letters to various churches at the dawn of Christianity. In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul writes, “The impulses of nature and the impulses of the spirit are at war with one another…My own actions bewilder me; what I do is not what I wish to do, but something which I hate” (Rm 7:15). The Catechism of the Catholic Church encourages us to see that “the interior penance of the Christian can be expressed in many and various ways. Scripture and the Fathers insist above all on three forms, fasting, prayer, and almsgiving” (CCC 1434). 

We live in a culture that promotes instant gratification, self-indulgence, relativism, perversity, and pride. If you look to the world, the world will tell you to do whatever you want, whenever you feel like it, and to construct your own moral compass where you get to “do you” without having to think of the consequences that your actions will have on the world, or your soul. Fasting can be a way to peel away the layers of this broken world and our understanding of it and to make space to God to speak to us. We intentionally carve out space, allowing our physical hunger to remind us of our hunger for God and for the prayer that wells up in this feeling of emptiness that reminds us of our dependence on Him.

​