jejum - to hell on a cream - celebrado artigo

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To Hell on a Cream Puff Posted Monday, November 13, 1995 in Christian Life

[Christianity Today, November 18, 1995]

It’s hard to know just how to take an invitation to write about gluttony. "We thought you would

be the perfect person," the editor’s letter read. "Gee, is it that obvious?" I thought, alarmed. "No,

no," I wanted to protest, "that’s not really me. It just these horizontal stripes." But, if I’m honest,

I have to admit that it is me. It’s most of us. Food is an intoxicating pleasure, and it appears

superficially like an innocuous one; it’s not one of the bad sins, like adultery or stealing. We

wouldn’t do that; gluttony is different. All it does is make you soft and huggable. It’s the cute sin.

But gluttony is not about pleasing plumpness; our inclination to associate it with external effects

alone shows how reluctant we are to confront the sin-in-the-heart. The impulse to gluttony is a

sign of being out of harmony with God’s provision and creation, and can disrupt the spiritual

lives of people of every size. External dimensions are no predictor of internal rebellion.

Previous generations of Christians knew this. Overindulgence in food didn’t just lead to

thickened waistlines and arteries; it led to spiritual disaster. These words from a nineteenth-

century Russian monk, Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, build to an alarming crescendo:

"Wise temperance of the stomach is a door to all the virtues. Restrain the stomach, and you will

enter Paradise. But if you please and pamper your stomach, you will hurl yourself over the

precipice of bodily impurity, into the fire of wrath and fury, you will coarsen and darken your

mind, and in this way you will ruin your powers of attention and self-control, your sobriety and

vigilance." (The Arena, Holy Trinity Monastery Press, 1991)

If that doesn’t make you take a second look at your second helpings, nothing will.

The key word in the passage above is "self-control." Gluttony is not wrong because it makes you

fat; it’s wrong because it is the fruit of self -indulgence. Gluttony says "Gimme;" Jesus says

"Come to me." When we come to him we give up all claims to be coddled; we come to shoulder

our own rough cross. The path to the buffet table and the path to sanctification lie in opposite

directions.

Anyone who has tried to diet knows that the will to eat indulgently is surprisingly strong and

unruly. Plans to eat reasonably and with an eye to good health may look very attractive on

Sunday night, when sketched out on a full stomach. (Oh yes, and we’ll get up early every day to

jog, too.) About 3:00 Monday afternoon, however, it’s a different stor y. The stomach that was

placid and amiable has become a bucking, rebellious pony, with a defiance that was never

evident until it was made to wear a bridle. Dieters are often shocked at how deep-seated and

ungovernable is their compulsion to eat unrestrained; facets of unconverted willfulness never

suspected, are being brought to light. What makes gluttony such a hard sin to break?

Of course, food is pleasurable; that alone can make a sin enticing. But while some pleasures can

be relinquished with a melancholy pang, the attempt to discipline food sins prompts a ferocious,

angry resistance. Something more is going on here. The urge to overindulge in food is powerful because it is linked to a desire for power. A complex net of submerged assumptions teaches us

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that food grants some limited, but tangible, control over the exterior world. We bite the Apple

(or the doughnut) because we have heard a whisper, "You shall be as gods." This plays out in

various ways:

1. Emperor Baby . Eating is the first pleasure. Researchers have found that, if amniotic fluid is

sweetened, unborn babies will gulp it more greedily. For a newborn, many sensations areunpleasant or frightening, but food, glorious food, is a constant and dependable comfort.

Controlling access to food, crying to be fed and winning the reward of sweet warm milk, is the

first task of newborn life. No wonder we retain to adulthood a zeal to gather as much good,

sweet food as we can grab; it was the first job we ever had, and it felt like an urgent one indeed.

"I don’t think it’s fair that they changed the rules," my husband said one day, looking forlornly at

the ends of his belt; they would no longer quite meet in front. "I can remember a time in my

life—in fact, it lasted quite a long time— when people were constantly saying, ‘Look how big

you’re getting to be!’ and ‘My, you’re becoming such a big boy!’" He tried once more to make the

belt ends meet. "Now that I’ve gotten really good at it, suddenly they changed the rules.Suddenly it’s not such a good thing."

His whimsical protest conceals a grain of truth. The baby that focuses all its attention on getting

food soon grows to be a child that is praised for eating, indulged with treats, and admired for

getting bigger. Not only is getting food our first job, not only is it intrinsically pleasurable, but

it’s a talent for which most of us are praised throughout our childhoods. When did they change

the rules?

2. I have the power. A related aspect of the desire to overeat is that it is a straightforward way

to demonstrate power. Life is complicated and fraught with compromises, unmet desires, and

nettling disappointments. We can’t make other people do right. Friends, neighbors, spouse,

children all may resist our will, but, darn it, that chocolate cream pie is going to know who’s

boss. Overeating can become a secret, habitual way to reassure yourself that you are not

powerless, that you can subdue and conquer as much food as you choose. Viewed in this light,

anorexia has the same root as gluttony: a desire to demonstrate control. Women starve

themselves to prove that they are the Empresses of Ice Cream, wieldinga scepter of iron

rejection where a plumper sister might choose the tactic of conquering by consuming.

3. Squirrel away . A related impulse is the need to hoard. Perhaps a cream pie this perfect will

never cross my path again; it’s only wisdom to tuck away as much as possible before the waiter

clears the plates and we must part forever. Hoarding food discloses our need to establishourselves as independent resources, free from dependence on God. There is an intrinsic mistrust

of his ability to provide, though he owns the cream pies on a thousand hills.

4. Boredom. A constant stream of pleasant sensations coming in helps keep more troubling

self-confrontation at bay. The continuing work of repentance is life-long, and comparatively less

jolly than a bag of gumdrops; those gumdrops may be just enough to keep us distracted one

more day. Bishop Brianchaninov, cited above, insisted that an evil of gluttony was its ability to

dull the mind. The Rev. Pat Reardon, a Pennsylvania pastor, says, "When people ask me why

God seems so distant, I ask them: How much TV have you been watching? What thoughts are

you allowing into your mind?" We could add: and how much idle junk food do you allow in your

pantry?



5. Big. The title is clumsy and forbidding, but Fat is a Feminist Issue delivers a startling insight.

Author Susie Orbach writes that many dieters self-sabotage because they fail to realize that

"Compulsive eating is linked to a desire to get fat…Many women are positively afraid of being

thin." This strikes as howlingly counter-intutitive, but Orbach’s research is intriguing. She has

women imagine themselves in a social situation; they are to envision every detail of dress,

posture, whom they talk with, how others react to them. Orbach has them imagine themselves inthe same situation, but immensely fat; then she has them repeat the exercise, but imagine

themselves of ideal slimness.

In a culture where slimness equals beauty, women have powerful reasons to want to be thin;

but, surprisingly, when they imagined it they found they didn’t enjoy it. Slimness was associated

with being "cold and ungiving," "self-involved," burdened with others’ expectations, the object of

unwanted desire from men and uncomfortable jealousy from women. The fat self, on the other

hand, was relaxed, free from unwanted sexual attention and the need to compete, and able to

talk comfortably with others.

But, most importantly, the fat self was bigger. This goes without saying, so it’s easy to miss what

saying it implies. One woman put it this way: "The fat in the situation [was] making me feel like

a sergeant major— big and authoritative. When I go through the fantasy seeing myself thin, what

immediately strikes me is just how fragile and little I feel, almost as though I might disappear or

be blown away."

Men have as many reasons as women do—maybe more—to want to be bigger. Our attempts at

self-control in eating fail, in part, because part of us really doesn’t want to risk shrinking. We

want to be big.

A "Bizarro" cartoon by Dan Piraro ran in our local newspaper. Piraro showed an enormously fat

man looking into a refrigerator, while a smaller man stood nearby, holding up a finger of

admonition. "You are what you eat," the scolder said. The fat man replied, "Good. That makes

me omnipotent."

One of the crueler tricks of temptation is that it exacts painful dues while failing to deliver the

promised pleasure. A really clever temptation can impose the very opposite of what was

promised. This is the case with gluttony. If overeating is about gaining power, the stomach may

indeed feel a gratifying, temporary dominance— but the overeater is more likely to feel ashamed

and out of control. Overeating may be an assertion of power, but the classic confession is: "I

have no will-power." Far from establishing the glutton as a master, it exposes him as a slave.

This is not a slavery merely to self; it is worse than that. St. Paul speaks of those "whose god is

the belly" (Phil. 3:19), and St. John Climacus, seventh-century abbot of the monastery on Mt.

Sinai, writes of "that clamorous mistress, the stomach." Those who succumb to gluttony

experience themselves, not as rulers, but as helpless prey. Prey, indeed, we are; this is not just a

matter of deficient self-control, but of slipping under another’s control, into another’s trap.

"Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (I Peter

5:8). It is in the nature of evil to consume, and those who feast wantonly become themselves

morsels.

C.S. Lewis, in his beloved The Screwtape Letters, has the senior devil write to his nephew: "To us

a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own



area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy [God the Father] demands

of men is quite a different thing…We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants

servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty

and would be filled; He is full and flows over."

When Screwtape’s nephew finally fails in his mission, the senior devil gloats in a fashion thatany glutton would find chilling: "I think they will give you to me now; or a bit of you. Love you?

Why, yes. As dainty a morsel as ever I grew fat on." This last letter is signed, "Your increasingly

and ravenously affectionate uncle, Screwtape."

"He is full and flows over," Lewis’s devil wrote. The flowing over by which God would fill us

extends from Genesis to Revelation. He does not merely decline to devour us, he feeds us. Eden

was planted with "every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food" (Genesis 2:9); in the

New Jerusalem there is "the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each

month" (Revelation 22:2). In the Song of Solomon we sing "He brought me to the banqueting

house" (Song of Solomon 2:4) and at the end we hear "Blessed are those who are invited to themarriage supper of the Lamb" (Revelation 19:9). We are invited to ask, "Give us this day our

daily bread." He feeds us; safe in his pasture, we will not become food. The task is learning to eat

the food he gives, in the measure he gives it, for our whole lives consist in learning what he

meant: "I have food to eat of which you do not know" (John 4:38).

Satan came to Adam in Paradise; he came to Christ in the desert. He came to two hungry men

and said: eat, for your hunger is proof that you depend entirely on food, that your life is in food.

And Adam believed and ate; but Christ rejected that temptation and said: man shall not live by

bread alone but by God. By doing this, Christ restored that relationship between food, life, and

God which Adam broke, and which we still break every day. (Fr. Alexander Schmemann, "On

Fasting at Great Lent," St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1969)

"Which we still break every day." How to restore that relationship? Mastering gluttony is a tricky

task, because you can never be sure you have arrived. With the broader sins, you can swear off

the behavior and know with certainty at the end of the day that you either kept your promise or

did not. The thief does not wonder whether or not he stole. The person struggling with

homosexual longing either went out and picked up a date, or spent the evening in beseeching

prayer. With some sins, there’s not much gray area.

With gluttony it’s almost all gray. You can’t simply swear off eating, and learning to eat aright

seems such a slippery, indefinable goal. The standards we concoct for ourselves seem to mock us. Sallie Tisdale wrote of dieting: "Eating became cheating. One pretzel was cheating. Two

apples instead of one was cheating—a large potato instead of a small, carrots instead of

broccoli…Diets have failure built in, failure is the definition. Every substitution—even carrots for

broccoli—was a triumph of desire over will…I saw that the real point of dieting is dieting—to not

be done with it, ever" (Harper’s Magazine, March 1993).

Yet overcoming gluttony must mean getting a handle on our intake of food, and Christians

through the ages have discovered various helps. For example, St. John Climacus, the seventh-

century abbot mentioned above, gave his monks specific, concrete advice (though he admitted

that "As we are about to speak concerning the stomach, as in everything else, we propose to

philosophize against ourselves. For I wonder if anyone has been liberated from this mistress

before settling in the grave.")



"He who fondles a lion tames it, but he who coddles the body makes it still wilder," St. John

warned. But he cautioned against excessive discipline, criticizing one who advised taking only

bread and water, "To prescribe this is like saying to a child: ‘Go up the whole ladder in one

stride.’" St. John recommended, rather, varying one’s discipline: "Let us for awhile only deny

ourselves fattening foods, then heated foods, and only then what makes our food pleasant. If possible, give your stomach satisfying and digestible food, so as to satisfy its insatiable hunger

by sufficiency, and so that we may be delivered from excessive desire."

Learning to eat rightly usually means, in our modern age, dieting. But dieting can merely be a

substitute of one of the Seven Deadly Sins for another: forsaking Gluttony, we fall into Vanity.

Christians have, from the earliest times, wrestled with the temptation to misuse food, but the

weapon they used wasn’t dieting. It was fasting.

Many Western Christians, particularly Protestants, think of fasting (if they do at all) as a tool for

intensifying prayer; Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, says that "The centralidea in fasting is the voluntary denial of an otherwise normal function for the sake of intense

spiritual activity." Narrow-focus fasting like this can powerfully enhance intercession,

repentance, and other spiritual undertakings.

There is a broader use of the discipline in the history of the church, however: regular, corporate,

extended fasting, as a means of broader spiritual growth. The earliest existing Christian

document outside Scripture is the Didache, or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (dates vary;

perhaps as early as 70 AD). The Didache reminds believers that the Jews fast on Tuesday and

Thursday —remember the Publican in the temple: "I fast twice a week" (Luke 18:12). But it

doesn’t say, "So avoid that foolishness, because we don’t need it." No, this earliest of church-

discipline texts instructs that Christians should fast as well, but on Wednesdays (the day of

Judas’s betrayal) and Fridays (the day of the Crucifixion).

Doesn’t this veer uncomfortably close to salvation by works? Southern Baptist minister Dallas

Willard writes in The Spirit of the Disciplines, "We have simply let our thinking fall into the grip

of a false opposition of grace to ‘works’ that was caused by a mistaken association of works with

‘merit.’" This confusion means that we don’t know how to live spiritually pure, healthy lives; we

don’t know how to harness the power that made Christians of other ages spiritual giants. "Faith

today is treated as something that only should make us different, not that actually does or can

make us different. In reality we vainly struggle against the evils of this world, waiting to die and

go to heaven."

Willard proposes that we take seriously the disciplines of the spiritual life: "Disciplines of

Abstinence" (including solitude, silence, fasting, chastity, and sacrifice) and "Disciplines of

Engagement" (like study, worship, service, prayer, and confession). If we want truly changed

and empowered lives, we must be as self-disciplined, and as constant in our disciplines, as an

athlete. Willard says that it’s not enough to be like the boy who, admiring his baseball hero,

imitates the way he holds his bat. The athlete did not win success by holding the bat a distinctive

way, but by living a fully disciplined life.

Willard is not the first to use this analogy, of course; St. Paul wrote, "Every athlete exercises self-

control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do

not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air, but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest

jejum - to hell on a cream - celebrado artigo

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