Fasting always feels weird to me as a spiritual exercise

“Dear God.  Here is a thing I am not doing.  I’m not doing it for this person and for your glory.  I will not do it until dinner time.  Please accept this thing I am not doing.”

I do it because the Church, which is smarter than me, recommends it and Jesus, who is way smarter than me, told the Church to recommend it.  But it always feels like I’m not doing anything. I know you are combine it with prayer and I do, but the prayer part is the part that feels like I’m doing something.  The fasting part just feels like I’m not doing something.

I think I sort of envisioned fasting as some kind of Vision Quest thing, like an aborigine going walkabout or a Native American taking peyote and having some kind of huge revelation, when I first became Catholic.  Fasting was supposed to be this dramatic encounter with evil in the desert of my soul like Jesus tempted in the wilderness.  But fasting mostly doesn’t work out that way at an affective level.  To be sure, hunger can bring to the surface things that control me–sometimes. And that’ good for prayer.  But a lot of times it just feels like I’m doing nothing, but doing it for God.

I don’t know what to make of that.  Take it as a ship’s log entry on my voyage toward (I hope) Heaven.