Fasting and the Suffering of Christ

a reflection, a prayer, and a recipe to start your week

Hey there!

Before I dive into this week’s essay, I want to let you know that my website went through a huge overhaul this past month and I am so excited about the new one. I’m adding lots of physical products and digital resources for you this year—the first of several are already available for purchase. These include the above print of a Liturgy for Baking Bread (perfect to hang in your kitchen!) as well as my guide to Dismantling Diet Culture, which expands on the essays I’ve been posting here in Substack over the past month. I’d love for you to go check it out!

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This month, we’re talking all about fasting.

I get it, fasting might not sound like the most fascinating topic, but I am here to convince you that in fact it is. You might not reach the end of this month eager to fall into the weekly fasting rhythms of, say, the Eastern Orthodox Church. You might even struggle still to commit to a fast come Lent!

That’s okay!

But historical Christian fasting practices also teach us a lot about historical understandings of Communion, or the Eucharist—a practice that I do hope you participate in with at least some regularity. Learning how the two are intertwined, I hope you become ever more enamored by this rite that is central to Christian practice.

This week, we’re going to talk about medieval Christian views of fasting and its relationship to the Eucharist, as well as the peculiar way some women used this practice to assert power when they had little. A huge thank you to Dr. Caroline Walker Bynum for her work on this topic—so much of my understanding came through her brilliant book Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.

We have many records of extreme fasting practices in the late middle ages. The most notable are medieval women who would fast from all food except the Eucharist. These eating habits (or lack thereof) appear to modern eyes as a form of anorexia. But for these women, it was a powerful means to assert control over their bodies in a society that afforded them little.

It is difficult to look back on these practices through a modern lens without projecting contemporary understandings of food and the withholding of it. In a world where access to food is, for most people, a given, choosing to withhold it is often associated with displeasure over the body. Today, the quest for sex and money is the most common way to pursue power. To choose to forego one or the other for the sake of one’s faith is an act of great humility.

For medieval Christians, though, food was not a given. Regular access to needed nutrients required hard work and proper weather conditions. Gluttony, then—the quest for more food than one needs—was considered a grave sin. It was the greatest form of lust, says Bynum. On the flip side, fasting—choosing to give up this vital resource for a time—was a form of great pain and an intimate way of experiencing a sense of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

The most extreme forms of asceticism (the women who ate nothing but the Eucharist) were not the norm, by any means. Like the desert fathers and mothers of early Christianity, those who committed to asceticism at this level understood themselves as uniquely called. They were not attempting to project a normative vision for the life of Christians.

But the austere fasting practices of the late middle ages were distinct from those of the early church, and they reflect a significant turn in the role of Communion in the life of the church.

For early Christians, fasting and the Eucharist went hand in hand as communal acts that bound the church together. This rhythm was also inextricably linked with almsgiving. To fast created the excess that could be given away to one’s neighbor. Therefore in fasting, Christians feed Christ through the feeding of others. And in the Eucharist Christ feeds Christians of his own body and blood.