CW: DISCUSSION OF DISORDERED EATING

This year my son’s birthday fell on Ash Wednesday. We planned for cake and candles following the 7 PM service. As planned, once I got home from church, we lit the candles on top of the gorgeous, fudgy cake I had purchased earlier that day and sang “Happy Birthday.” My son blew all 16 flames out with one, strong exhalation. I sliced and served the cake and came face to face with temptation.

I was tempted to give myself a slice half the size of everyone else’s.

I was tempted to say I was not hungry.

I was tempted to push the cake around my plate with my fork, pretending I was eating without actually having to do so.

I was tempted to listen to that voice in my head that told me, “Well, you can eat that but it is late, and you are not supposed to eat after 8 because, you know, it will just go straight to your waistline and if you do eat it, you better plan for an extra long workout tomorrow.”

Food is often associated with temptation. Paradise is lost through a bite of an apple. (Well, maybe a pomegranate, which I can understand; who can resist that jewel-like fruit?) Jesus is tempted in the wilderness with promises of bread conjured out of stone. Many a Lenten discipline has been built around giving up chocolate or cheese.

But for me, restriction is my temptation. It has been since I was a kid. It started with a few off-hand comments. My grandfather said, as I got a second glass of milk with dinner, that it was a good thing I drank skim because otherwise I’d get fat. I hit puberty at 13, stood almost 6 foot tall, and more than one person observed that it was good I was thin because it’s ok to be tall as a girl, but not ok to be big as one.

At some point, I understood that I should take up less space in the world. And I spent years doing just that. In high school my lunches got smaller and smaller and my runs longer and longer. And while I never developed a full-blown eating disorder, disordered eating, that is constantly monitoring and restricting my food, became the only way I knew how to live.

And while eating disorders are often considered a modern invention, they have been documented for centuries, even within the church. In the Middle Ages something termed anorexia mirabilis, a miraculous absence of appetite, was considered a spiritual practice, usually seen only in women and girls, meant to emulate the sufferings of Christ. Catherine of Siena might be the most famous example of this phenomenon; it is said that she would go weeks with the host as her only sustenance. 

This particularly female ascetic practice of self-denial and control that Catherine and other women engaged in had the added benefit, I suspect, of minimizing not only their bodies but their sexuality as well. Prolonged periods of fasting and weight loss often result in a desexualization of a woman’s body as her breasts shrink and her menstruation ceases. And given the fact that much of our church’s tradition and theology has laid the temptation of Adam and responsibility for The Fall at the feet of a woman offering food to a man, this denial of food and desexualization of the body would likely have seemed all the holier.

For me, at least, the practice of self-denial and fasting pulls me farther away from Christ and connection to God. It requires near constant attention to myself, cataloguing what I have eaten, calculating calorie counts, checking the mirror again and again for evidence that I have gained or lost weight. Some might say this is simply vanity run amok and there might be some truth in that. But if we define vanity as a good friend of mine does, as a deep-seated belief that we are not worthy of love so we do everything we can to make ourselves so, vanity takes on a different cast. Perhaps I am trying to make myself worthy of others’ love, and worthy of God’s.

Because it is hard to trust God sometimes, it is hard to trust that God loves me. And it is hard to trust that God is really in control, especially when the world and my life feels so utterly out of control. And so I am tempted again and again to wrest what control I can by limiting what I put in my mouth. And it is an illusion, I know, but it is a soothing one for me.

And limiting what we eat is celebrated not just within the church, but perhaps even more so outside of it. Diet culture is endemic to our modern world, with billions of dollars made off the message that weight is synonymous with health and desirability and happiness.

And maybe that is why this conflation of food and temptation, especially prevalent during Lent, is so painful to me, because I look to the church as a counter-cultural institution that stands against the secular culture of consumerism and body obsession. 

One of my favorite stories in scripture is that of Elijah in 1 Kings. After Elijah has triumphed over the priests of Baal, his life is threatened by Queen Jezebel and King Ahab and he runs away. 1 Kings 19:4-8 tells us: 

But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”  Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again.  The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. 

Here is a story of God feeding Elijah, of God caring for Elijah. Elijah experienced God’s love in a meal just as we experience God’s love in our shared meal at the altar.

And while it is likely just a trick of translation and probably what Elijah was offered was bread, I love that the NRSV translates the food God gave Elijah as “cake.” Elijah ate the cake God gave him and was healed and restored. The night of my son’s birthday, Ash Wednesday, I resisted the temptation to restrict my food and I ate my piece of cake to celebrate the miracle of the birth of my son.

And I felt God’s love.