The Grace of Growling

Let me tell you about my stomach. It is an ambitious animal. It has appetites and sub-appetites and tiny impatient cravings that leap out of nowhere, like frogs from the ditch after rain. My stomach has the memory of a Jesuit. It remembers every cookie it has ever been denied.

Once, during Lent, I tried to fast from lunch. By 1:15 in the afternoon, I had mentally devoured an entire Costco rotisserie chicken, half a loaf of sourdough, and a large brownie. I was not, as the saints say, recollected.

I sat there, head in my hand, thinking: Is this fasting thing really supposed to make me holy? Or is it just an elaborate form of crankiness blessed by the Church?

But then I felt something. The littlest sliver of humility, thin as wafer bread, but real. I realized I was hungry in a way that had nothing to do with chicken or brownies. I was hungry to depend on Someone. Hungry to stop being my own full-time provider, my own little security system against the emptiness that keeps rushing in.

And that, I think, is the start of it.

Fasting is not punishment. It is not God demanding you feel faint to prove your devotion. It is not a moral workout where you burn spiritual calories to tone your soul. It is love’s peculiar logic, which is to make space.

The Catechism says fasting expresses conversion in relation to ourselves, to God, and to others. That is the whole economy of divine love right there: turning away from self-absorption, turning toward the Lord, and finding your neighbor in the same turn. When fasting is done right, it smells less like deprivation and more like freedom.

Romano Guardini once wrote that the soul must empty itself of noise if it is to receive truth. Maybe fasting is the quieting of the body so the heart can finally listen. Our stomachs are teachers. They remind us that every appetite is a question waiting for God’s answer. To fast is to pause before the reaching and notice who is doing the reaching and why. That pause is where grace can slip in, small and uninvited yet welcome.

The Bible hums with fasting. Israel fasts when she realizes she has wandered off course. “Return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning,” says Joel 2. The fasting is not the point; the returning is.

Jesus fasts in the wilderness, forty long dusty days. His body is empty so His heart can be full of the Father. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Every Lent, we repeat this line like children learning the family story again. We are more than mouths. Yet Jesus does not despise bread. He multiplies it later for the crowd. He does not condemn appetite; He restores it to truth.

Isaiah 58 gives the great corrective. Do not fast while your laborers starve. Do not bow your head like a reed while you ignore the hungry. That is counterfeit fasting. True fasting, God says, loosens the bonds of injustice. If my lunch hour piety does not make me kinder or more generous with whatever food I do eat, then it is just religious dieting.

There is that moment in Matthew 6. “When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.” Do not turn your sacrifice into theater. Do not be a martyr for the crowd. There is a hidden arithmetic in holiness. Whatever is done in secret is seen by the Father.

The desert fathers knew this. They fled to the wilderness not because they hated the world but because they knew how noisy it had become inside themselves. John Cassian wrote that fasting was the foundation of purity of heart. Not because it scored points with heaven but because it stripped away excuses. The hunger humbles. The stomach tells the truth. We are not self-sufficient.

Saint Thomas Aquinas said fasting belongs to temperance, the virtue that steadies our desires so they serve love instead of mastering it. This is not repression but right relationship. In fasting we reorder the loves that have fallen out of tune, comfort and distraction and the small hidden gods in our cupboards.

And the mystics, those luminous ones like Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, would add that the emptiness fasting makes is not a void but capacity. The Lord loves a soul that has room for Him to enter.

Modern psychologists talk about attention training, impulse control, detachment from compulsions, all of which sound like good parenting for the soul. But theology goes deeper. To fast is to notice how attached we are to tiny medicating rituals: scrolling, sipping, biting, defending. It is to meet the frightened self that wants control above all things.

When you stop feeding that self, even for a bit, you see what it is made of. Anxious, proud, craving comfort. And that is mercy, not condemnation. Because God cannot heal the self you keep pretending to be.

Fasting lays the cards on the table. It says, Here, Lord, this is who I am when I do not get what I want. And God, who has seen all this before, smiles to see you finally tell the truth.

I once knew a woman who always gave the money she saved from fasting meals to the local food bank. She said it reminded her that Lent is not about less so much as about more, more solidarity, more room, more love walking around in a world starving for it.

Saint Vincent de Paul said the poor are our masters. Saint Teresa of Calcutta said the worst hunger is not for bread but to be loved. They understood Isaiah’s warning: real fasting moves outward. It turns your stomach ache into someone else’s bread.

The Eucharist makes the logic of fasting luminous. You abstain for a time so that you may truly feast when the Lord breaks Himself open on the altar. Every hunger points toward that cosmic table where Christ is both host and food, both hunger and fulfillment.

Ours is an age of constant snack, digital, emotional, informational. We binge on images, opinions, approval. We are full to bursting yet spiritually malnourished.

Fasting is rebellion against this soft slavery. It whispers freedom into a culture of compulsion. It teaches that you do not have to click, sip, or swallow the moment you feel the twinge of need. You can wait. You can choose. Waiting is holy.

Guardini said interior freedom begins when the soul learns detachment. Not coldness but calm possession of itself under God. Josef Pieper called temperance the first condition of love. Both knew that to love rightly, you must first be free from being dragged around by appetite.

So modern fasting, if it is wise, must be quiet, unspectacular, gentle. No bragging to the internet. No obsession with rules. Just a steady training of the heart to prefer the Giver to the gifts.

Give up screens for an hour. Give up biting words. Give up the last piece of chocolate if it keeps your child grinning. Give up anxiety’s favorite mantra that nothing will ever change. These too are fasts, and holy ones.

I once fasted poorly, grumpily, theatrically, with all the grace of a brick. And yet, God still used it. Even through my crankiness, I found a whisper of peace, as if Heaven were saying, “Child, thank you for at least trying to make room.”

Because that is what fasting finally is, making a little holy space. Fasting does not earn God’s presence; it reveals it. It is sweeping the room before Love enters, clearing one chair at the table for the divine Guest who was already on His way.

And if you listen closely enough through the growl of your stomach, you might hear that quiet laughter of God, delighted that one of His children finally made a little room.

Let every hunger, then, be a kind of prayer:
Lord, within this emptiness, come and be my fullness.