The Sentient Space

Mar 4, 2004, 12.00am IST
Arash Vafa Fazil.

Fasting is Food For the Soul


The followers of the Baha’i faith are on a 19-day fast from March 2 to March 20. In this context, it would be instructive to look at the significance of fasting in all faiths . Fasting may assume different forms across different belief systems but is an integral feature of humanity’s common spiritual heritage.

We must ask ourselves why God wants us to abstain from food and drink. Obviously, as the all-loving creator, He would derive no pleasure from the mere act of making his creatures endure hunger and thirst for a specified period. We may as well go a little further and ask ourselves why we have spiritual laws at all.

Baha’is believe the answer lies in understanding the reality of man. Human beings have a two-fold nature — material and spiritual. The material nature of man corresponds to the material world, which is governed by certain laws. For his well being, man must obey these laws. For example, if a person walks off a cliff, he will put himself to great harm; if he neglects to regularly feed his body with the required nutrients he will imperil his existence; or if he comes in the way of a fast-moving object he could be fatally knocked down. Therefore, the consequences of disobeying the laws of material existence could be serious.

Similarly, man has a spiritual nature, a soul which corresponds to the spiritual order of God. These laws are to be found in the world’s major religions. Their purpose is to help man avoid behaviour that is hazardous to his spiritual health, and to develop virtues instead. The observance of these spiritual laws contribute to man’s material well being. As Baha’u’llah said, spiritual laws are “the highest means for the maintenance of order in the world and the security of its peoples”.

When the Baha’is fast they abstain from eating and drinking from sunrise to sunset. Baha’u’llah, the prophet-founder of the Baha’i faith, enjoined this sacred law on all his believers aged 15 to 70. As a token of His mercy He exempted those who are sick, travelling, engaged in hard labour, nursing mothers and menstruating women from the observance of this law. At the culmination of this 19-day period, on March 21, He ordained the festival of Naw-ruz, which is the Baha’i New Year.

According to the Baha’i scriptures, fasting ‘‘is essentially a period of meditation and prayer, of spiritual recuperation during which the believer must strive to make the necessary readjustments to his inner life, and to refresh and reinvigorate the spiritual forces latent in his soul’’. Thus, in the Baha’i perspective, the law of fasting is predicated on the belief that the human soul is a power-house of spiritual forces which are in a latent condition. For them to be fully expressed, they need to be periodically ‘‘refreshed and reinvigorated’’. To resort to a mundane metaphor, fasting is an annual ser-vicing of the soul.

Prayer, meditation, deep introspection of one’s ‘‘inner life’’ and the will to make the necessary readjustments are the means by which this ‘‘spiritual recuperation’’ would occur. What about the abstention from food and drink? The Baha’i scriptures say that its significance is purely symbolic — it is meant to be ‘‘a reminder of abstinence from selfish and carnal desires’’. In other words, merely not eating or drinking can do nothing to rejuvenate the soul. We merely need to control our basal appetites and clear the way for undistracted inner development.
Fasting is meant to enhance self-control and awareness of one’s spiritual dimension. It channelises the thoughts and energies of all individuals towards these ends, quite irrespective of their religion.