Even if I must be reckoned a materialist, I shall add that I scarcely believe in a spirituality that is content with interior states. Just as it is unhealthy to be content with observances without caring about what goes on inside, so we are deceived by cultivating sentiments not translated into any practice. Pharisaic exteriority has a no less deadly counterpart: pure interiority, combining beautiful states of soul with middle-class comfort. True spirituality is one that is incarnate in acts. The realism of the ancients understood this well. To despise these concrete practices that make the man is to separate the soul from the body, to enter into a sort of death, to fall into angelism and illusion.
– Adalbert de Vogüé, To Love Fasting: The Monastic Experience (1986).
Good luck finding this book – I had to borrow it through my seminary’s inter-library loan – but it’s worth it if you can. Vogüé, a Benedictine monk, has for many years practiced the regular fast in which only supper is eaten each day. He uses his experience as a way to explore fasting and why it has slowly fallen from favor within much of Christianity. His happy approach to fasting is a surprising and helpful entry into a subject we usually think about with some discomfort, if not dread.
David W. Swanson 