Fast (?) Sunday

It is the first Sunday of the month. In many Mormon families that means one thing: no breakfast! Well, that’s a bit of an oversimplification, I’ll admit, but fasting (for twenty-four hours or as close as you can get) is customary on the first Sunday of every month. We call it Fast Sunday. (We also joke, of course, that Fast Sundays are slooooooow.) We even hold a special version of our Sunday services in which congregation members (or occasionally people off the street, as happened once when I was a child) stand at the pulpit and speak extemporaneously. Only those who want to, mind you. No one is required to come up to the pulpit – and those who come up are discouraged from taking up all the time. But the state of fasting combined with the opportunity to speak about personal spiritual testimonies and experiences can make for a unique, tender, bizarre, hilarious and/or moving church meeting.

But I digress (and really, Fast & Testimony meetings deserve their own post!)…

Fast Sunday observance is different from family to family. Really, aren’t all religious practices? Some Mormon families interpret the charge to go without food for twenty four hours as literal: stop eating at two p.m., start eating the next day at 2 p.m. Others interpret twenty-four hours as two meals (Saturday dinner and Sunday breakfast), others as three (Saturday dinner, Sunday breakfast and Sunday lunch). I even knew (of) one family that went without food all Sunday. No succulent pot roast simmering in the crockpot for them when they arrived home after three+ hours at church.

Shortly after I was baptized at age eight, I started to learn how to fast. I imagine that for many years, my fasting was simply going without breakfast, but for my parents, fasting commenced after a hearty mid-afternoon lunch on Saturday and continued until the following Sunday afternoon. Of course, as a child … and teenager, I was looking for shortcuts. It didn’t help that my mother made us help prepare the Sunday feast we would eat to end our fast while still fasting! Slicing olives was a particular agony, as the work was both tedious and appetizing.

Fast forward to the present. I am now the mother of two children who are old enough to fast, at least according to LDS tradition. My newly baptized daughter is raring to go. She can’t wait to skip a meal or three, though I don’t think she’s aware of the spiritual undertones of the ritual. My son is older, but as a type 1 diabetic has to be careful about food intake. Traditional fasting isn’t an option for him, but I’ll admit that I’ve been a little lazy about finding other options, so for the past three years, Sunday mornings have looked the same every week of the month: me, rushing about; kids, lazing about. Me, no time to eat; kids, all the time in the world to make syrup letters on their hot pancakes. (They might disagree with that characterization!)

But as I’ve learned more about mindfulness and begun to implement what I’ve learned into my spiritual practices, I am encouraged to plant the seed of fasting in my children. I think that going without can be a valuable exercise. And I think that the generosity that is supposed to underscore our fasts – the charge to donate the cost of the meals not eaten to help the poor and needy – is powerful. I think that going hungry can make us mindful of other people and other feelings that we might otherwise overlook. And I think that the spiritual power that is meant to accompany sincere fasts can be real.

My 21st century American children think that going without is when they have to drink tap water instead of something cold in a bottle or that time our wifi service was in transition and we somehow had to make due with only a closet full of dusty board games to entertain us. I have (gasp!) turned into the kind of parent who says, “When I was a girl, I had to drink powdered milk” (true story) or “When I was your age, I was already chopping all the wood and bringing up water from the well for Ma and Pa” (story “borrowed” from Laura Ingalls Wilder).

And so it was with great interest that I read a short article in a newsletter last week that posited the idea of media fasts for children – a space of time, whether an afternoon or a week, of going without television, video games, streaming movies, internet browsing, texting and so forth. I was interested! Perhaps my children and I can experiment a bit with principles of sacrifice and patience. Even though the article was about children, I know that I could stand to turn off the laptop once in awhile. What would a Sunday without any kind of, as we call it, “screen time” look like? And what could we offer in return? Perhaps our time? We could give the three or five or eight hours to the poor and needy, however that needs to be defined.

I’ve also thought about trying a sugar fast or a soda fast. Or going twenty four hours without any processed food and giving to the local food bank as our offering. The possibilities are vast. The opportunities are vast as well. I think that our LDS tradition of fasting is worthwhile, something valuable to practice and to teach. From greater spiritual sensitivity and compassion to stronger willpower and appreciation, the benefits are real.

And I plan to start all of this … next Fast Sunday! Right now, I need to scramble some eggs for my kids.

So other ideas for fasting? What would you find meaningful to sacrifice?