Fasting - Worthy and Difficult

"In a more tangible, visceral way than any other spiritual discipline, fasting reveals our excessive attachments and the assumptions that lie behind them.  Food is necessary to life, but we have made it more necessary than God.  How often have we neglected to remember God's presence when we would never consider neglecting to eat!  Fasting brings us face to face with how we put the material world ahead of its spiritual source...

"Perhaps we can see, then, that the discipline of fasting has to do with the critical dynamic of accepting those limits which are life-restoring.  Our culture would seduce us into believing that we can have it all, do it all, and (even more preposterous!) that we deserve it all.  Yet in refusing to accept limits on our consumption or activity, we perpetuate a death-dealing dynamic in the world.  That is why the discipline of fasting is so profoundly important today."
--Marjorie Thompson, "Soul Feast"