how often should one fast?
Columns
| Restrictions |
| Written by Jesse Crowley |
| Thursday, 11 March 2010 |
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In 2002, Jack White of The White Stripes decided to take a slightly different direction with their third studio album White Blood Cells, deciding that the album would feature no slide guitar, and no blues songs. Considering the fact that the blues was both a dominant influence and component of their previous two albums, this decision was particularly surprising to the music world. A guitarist who Rolling Stone Magazine consider the 17th greatest guitarist of all time, significantly based on his abilities as a blues-based musician, deciding to leave the slide alone and abandon blues songs for an album altogether? Why? Well, as a result of this self-imposed restriction, the band found a new freedom in a slightly different direction. With the constraint, with the pressure of a low ceiling, with the “knowledge that you can’t do what you normally do”, a new form of creativity surfaced, and White Blood Cells became what many critics consider one of the greatest albums of the last decade. In the dramatic art form of Improv, scenes can often take shape without any restriction, but they can also have certain restrictions imposed before the scene begins, with the actors involved having to work around them. An example is a popular game called “Questions Only”, in which the actors can only speak in questions to each other. Again, why would people involved in this art form choose to restrict themselves? Because in the restrictions, in the limitations, alternative avenues are discovered, different opportunities arise allowing the actors display their talent in new, hilarious, and artistically incredible ways. In the art of love, a parallel can be drawn. I’m speaking specifically about fasting. We are currently in the season of Lent in the Catholic faith, but whether or not you’re Catholic doesn’t change the positive impact that fasting can have on your ability to love, specifically in regards to chastity. Why on earth would I ever want to do that Jesse? Why would I ever want to cut something that I like out of my life? (Well first of all, I’m not talking about fasting from porn, because you shouldn’t just temporarily fast from porn, you should cut it out altogether). It’s the same answer as to why Jack White cut out the slide, why improvists in “Questions Only” cut out everything but questions. When you put a limitation on yourself, a restriction, a knowledge that “you can’t do what you normally do”, you open yourself up to new possibilities. New opportunities to exercise your abilities in the field in question present themselves. So, not only does fasting from something you normally enjoy (whether it be a particular kind of food, music, movies, Facebook, or whatever) strengthen your ability at being able to say “no” to lust in the future, it creates new ways in which you are able to create. This is essentially the point of what I’m saying: fasting helps you to be able to produce something. Fasting from the blues helped Jack White create a ground breaking album, fasting from regular dialogue helps improvists create dramatically unique moments onstage completely unrehearsed, and fasting from something I enjoy helps me to create opportunities to love others. When we fast, we forget our own desires, and when we cut those out in a certain area, we make space in our lives to love. Whether that restriction allows you more opportunity to love God by devoting yourself to prayer, or whether it allows you more opportunity to love others, either way its creating something beautiful.
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