Asceticism

By Brother David

Asceticism: severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.(Google)


Depending on your point of view, the word asceticism evokes either admiration or dread. For many, it is virtually synonymous with fanaticism—certainly with deprivation. It conjures thoughts of heroic feats leading to the heights of holiness through the expiation of sins; images of monks emaciated by fasting, eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep keeping vigils: a sea of pain that we mere mortals dip our toe into during Lent with the fast, giving up perhaps chocolate or dessert or cigarettes, only to retreat quickly (and perhaps with some sense of guilt) to the shore of ease come the Pasch. And yet…

And yet the word itself gives us a different picture and perhaps a truer insight into the nature, purpose, and reality of what asceticism really is. We take the word asceticism from the Greek askesis, which is formed from the verb askeo: to form by art, to fashion, also to adorn or decorate and further, to practice or train. The noun askesis, besides meaning practice or training, came also to mean a mode of life or a profession. So we see that asceticism has nothing to do with pain or deprivation or fanaticism, even though, as with the practice of any art, it certainly involves discomfort, rigor, and dedication. We could speak of the asceticism of the musician or the athlete and be perfectly accurate, although we might be given a couple of odd looks. So asceticism is ultimately practical and is practiced towards an end and is not an end in itself. The pianist doesn’t practice scales because scales are so interesting. Rather, the practice of scales leads to greater facility in playing music. (Although sometimes the very exploration of technique can be beautiful in itself when it is presented in an artistic manner—I’m thinking here of works like the Chopin and Paganini etudes or the practice of yoga asana.)

One thing, however, to dismiss at the very start of our consideration is the idea that asceticism has something to do with expiation of our sins: that somehow engaging in not eating chocolate or in going to church every Wednesday and Friday during Lent is going to make God look on you with greater mercy because you are doing something to “make up” for your sinful behavior. If that is why you are doing any ascetical practice, I’d suggest that you stop right now. It’s not going to work. We have already been redeemed in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, his redemptive act, so there’s nothing more to be done. The gates of mercy are opened to us, and God’s love is assured to each and every one of us. However, there is something to the ascetical life that is worthwhile even if it doesn’t have anything to do with “making up” for stuff we’ve done. After all, even Jesus fasted and kept vigils, and if he found those ascetical practices useful, it behooves us as disciples of his to consider the topic seriously.

In order to explore this topic further, I’d like to examine four ascetical disciplines: fasting, silence, solitude, and watchfulness.

Fasting means not eating. The extended usage goes to not eating certain things or depriving oneself of certain things. One might not eat except for one meal per day, but one can also fast from chocolate, meat, desserts, cigarettes, shopping, movies, television, sports…. the list is (pretty much) endless. What happens when we fast? Well, a whole series of things happen physiologically when we drastically reduce our intake of food: we start to starve. So let’s take a more modified approach to what fasting means.

If fasting is to be effective as a spiritual discipline, it needs to be fasting from something that we have used to get us through stressful times but that has become a self-perpetuating and deleterious habit. It is important to remember that we do need respite from stress, but engaging in activities that merely delay our experience of stress while creating their own stress is unhealthy and, to say the least, counterproductive. Having a cookie and a glass of milk or cup of coffee as a break in our work might be useful, but if it progresses to food grazing we may have a problem. Watching a television program or taking a few minutes on YouTube may be relaxing, but channel or internet surfing can become a trancing activity where what started as a 15 minute break becomes a 2 or 3 (or 4 or 5) hour marathon. Cigarettes are just bad for you no matter what. You get the idea.

While addiction may be too strong a term for these activities, they share a few hallmarks:

1. We find ourselves drawn to them almost against our will.

2. They create some degree of unmanageability in our lives.

3. We experience a kind of withdrawal when we fast from them.

So, on the one hand, fasting from these activities or behaviors or substances breaks their hold on us, which allows us to become more effective in our own lives. On the other hand, the experience of the withdrawal itself carries its own benefit.

When we withdraw from these activities, we find ourselves facing stress on its own terms. We also find ourselves confronting things like our own irritability, anger, fear, procrastination, or anxiety that our behaviors masked. In this we find the real essence of fasting: it brings us face to face with our shadow self, where we have to admit that what we are like and what we think we are like are two different things. This is the gift of withdrawal: a truer understanding of who we are.

Silence means not making noise. This noise can be anything from unconscious slamming of doors to untrammeled, unnecessary, unreflective speech. I once read the comment, “I can’t hear the noise in your head. Please keep it that way.” Noise is irritating and stressful. When we engage in silence we are enacting a basic respect for the people around us. Prescinding from gossip and unnecessary chatter offers a certain mental and even physical “space” to ourselves and those around us.

Moreover, if silence is a fasting from external noise, all the more so is it refraining from interior noise. In silence, we put down our interior excuses. We cease from judging and plotting revenge. We put a stop to our alternative stories wherein we are always the good guy, the hero, the victim, etc. We give ourselves the space to observe ourselves as we really are. And in this silence, when we have stopped making up the stories we tell ourselves, we can also start to see people—and even God—as they really are. Things and situations are seen more clearly because we have stopped imposing our preconceptions on them. Speech ceases to be a mechanism of obfuscation and misdirection but instead becomes the window through which we can be seen and known. This is why all true speech is prayer, because it builds up relationships. And true speech can only flourish in silence.

Solitude is essentially being alone. Each of us, regardless of our support and relationships, experiences that radical aloneness from which we can jump off in many directions. We can feel lonely, thinking that other people should be there, that we should have a friend or a spouse, someone to care about us. We can move to isolation, whereby we push people away, not letting them intrude into our lives, seeing them as burdens or perhaps even distractions from our self-imposed misery and self-pity. True solitude is neither of these.

In solitude we are thrown back on the resources of the self. We encounter, in a fundamental way, our brokenness and our absolute need for the Other and for otherness. It is in Jesus’ experience in the desert that he comes face to face with the great temptations and recognizes and proclaims his reliance on the Father. It is in solitude that we recognize our frailty as well as our strengths, with neither exaggeration nor minimizing. We understand that victim and conqueror are both fantasy, that fame is meaningless, that the construct of a stable self is an illusion, and that everything that we are and have is pure gift.

As we enter deeper into solitude we also find that the self is endlessly fascinating. This is not to say that we’re all that and a bag of chips; rather, as we observe the machinations of the self in both strength and weakness, we come to appreciate how the self has contrived to survive all that has come its way. Some of the solutions may well be unhealthy and maladaptive, but they were the best that the self could cobble together at times of crisis. The tragedy, of course, is that what might have been a temporary fix became all too often a permanent fixture. It is in solitude that we can examine the truth of the self, now that, through fasting, we have stripped the material supports and, through silence, we have put an end to the false stories that we used to facilitate our own re-traumatization.

Finally, as Gloria Jean Watkins, better known as Bell Hooks, American author, feminist, and social activist, said, “Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” By learning to appreciate the infinite value of our self we come to appreciate the infinite value of every other self; we recognize that the other does not exist for our sake. This is a fundamental truth of relationship: to the extent that the end is utilitarian, i.e. to the extent that the other is apprehended as tool and not as self, to that extent is there no relationship.

Watchfulness means paying attention or attending to. It is fixing the attention on what lies before one. Watchfulness goes beyond noticing. Attending to is an intentional action, and all forms of asceticism imply watchfulness in both their origin and end purpose, but watchfulness has its own dynamic and its own value as well. As we attend to the world and the self (as well as other selves), we begin to appreciate, to value, all that lies within the field of our awareness.

The Greek term of which this is often the translation is nepsis, from the verb nepho, meaning to drink no wine and so to be sober and/or dispassionate. Thus, the noun nepsis is the term for sobriety. Taken in this sense, the asceticism of our attending to situations is also to keep our attention free of distortion, whether from substances or from bad habits of thought or from unexamined attitudes. This implies a level of self-care so that we are eating, resting, exercising, working, and playing in such ways as to, so to speak, keep the lens of the mind and heart clean from the dust and muck that can accumulate so easily.

Thus, the end of watchfulness is to apprehend reality as it is to the extent that we can, whether that reality be a stone on the beach, a galaxy, the person next to me, or the God that we worship in Trinity.

It is perhaps in watchfulness that we see the art of asceticism, as I noted above concerning the examples of music and yoga. The practice of meditation is, in itself, a thing worthy of being pursued without the need for some kind of result other than itself because it is, in itself, enriching and meaningful. In it, all forms of asceticism find their natural culmination: engagement with reality.

The purpose, then, of asceticism goes far beyond any mere expiation of sins. It is rather the practice that allows us to truly appreciate our redemption and to grasp the enormity of forgiveness. It gives us a true vision of ourselves in our sinfulness and blessedness, and it enkindles in us the desire, the longing to behold the face of the ultimate reality: a loving God who emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and who humbled himself even so far as to accept death, death on a cross. (Phil 2:7, 8)