Just Give Up
On fasting, apophatic theology, and the spiritual practice of emptiness.
What are you giving up for Lent?
I get asked this every year, and every year I give more or less the same answer. I tell my congregations: we always talk about giving something up for Lent. What I actually want us to do is just give up.
That usually gets a laugh. But I mean it. And I want to explain what I mean, because I think buried inside that joke is actually the whole theology of fasting, which is something the church has managed to mostly forget.
The problem with how we talk about fasting
There’s a parable Jesus tells about two men praying in the temple. One is a Pharisee. The other is a tax collector. The Pharisee stands up and prays: God, I thank you that I am not like other people. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of all I get.
Here’s the thing about the Pharisee. He’s a good guy. Fasting twice a week. Tithing ten percent of his income. This is not a bad person. By every visible measure, this is exactly the kind of person you’d want in your community.
And his fast means absolutely nothing.
It means nothing because his fasting has become a line on his spiritual resume. It’s a performance of righteousness, not for God’s benefit: for his own. God doesn’t need his stuff. God never needed his stuff. And the Pharisee is so busy justifying himself that there’s no room left for grace to work.
This is a classic trap for religious people. The bait is that it feels damn good to be so confident in your spiritual attainment. The trap is the discovery that you can’t keep it up forever, and being responsible for your own salvation is exhausting. In fact, it’s deadly.
There’s a traditional version of this trap. You fast because it proves something about you. The details vary by tradition, but the logic underneath is transactional. Do the thing, demonstrate your seriousness, add it to the list of reasons God should be impressed with you.
There’s a progressive version too: fast in solidarity with those who don’t have enough. Skip your latte, donate the money. The impulse is good. Justice matters, and the prophetic tradition is clear that God cares about what we do with our resources. But as a theology of fasting, this still makes the practice about you. It turns fasting into a performance. It lets comfortable people feel like they’ve understood something about poverty that a week without coffee didn’t actually teach them. And it relocates the spiritual work from the self to the gesture.
Both versions give fasting a job to do outside of itself. Both make it instrumental. And both of them, if you look closely, are species of the same disease: self-righteousness. The compulsion to be responsible for your own spiritual life. To manage your own righteousness. To stay in control.
That’s the Pharisee’s real problem. He’s standing in the temple trying to be his own god.
What you’re actually reaching for
The tax collector in the same parable can’t even lift his eyes. He beats his breast and says one thing: God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
He goes home justified. The Pharisee doesn’t. Why? Because the tax collector is the one who asks. He comes with open hands. He comes with nothing to present.
When you fast, when you step back from whatever you habitually reach for, something like that happens. The reaching stops. And the ache underneath becomes visible.
Most of the time we are reaching without asking why. We reach for food. For distraction. For comfort. For noise. For the feeling of being in charge of something. Some of it is genuine hunger. Some of it is habit so deep we’ve forgotten it’s a choice. Some of it is anxiety we haven’t named yet. The reaching is constant, and because it’s constant, we don’t have to look at what’s driving it.
Fasting interrupts the reflex. It creates a gap. And in that gap, you have to sit with whatever was underneath the reach in the first place.
I think about this in terms of open and closed hands. If you’re trying to give me a gift and I’m clutching everything I own against my chest, where are you going to put it? There’s no room. The only way to receive anything is to let go of what you’re gripping so tightly.
That’s what fasting does. It pries the fingers open. And the discomfort of letting go is real. It should be. But the discomfort isn’t the point. The point is honesty. You are becoming present to your own need in a way that’s impossible when you’re constantly filling it. Constantly managing it. Constantly performing competence at your own salvation.
Grace doesn’t work on the performed version of you. It works on the real one. The one in the gap. The one holding the ache. The one who has stopped pretending to have it together.
Fasting is how we cooperate with the Holy Spirit to make room for God’s grace. We clear the noise. We stop the reaching. We open the hands. And we let ourselves be found.
The ancient move
Early Christians had a framework for what I’ve been describing here: apophasis.
The apophatic tradition, sometimes called negative theology, is one of the oldest and most profound streams in Christian spirituality. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian fathers (and mothers—we mustn’t forget his sister) understood something that a lot of modern Christianity has lost: God exceeds our categories. Every image we construct, every description we offer, every conceptual handle we try to grab falls short.
It’s ontologically impossible to appropriately describe what God is. God is more than our language can contain.
In his Life of Moses, Gregory describes the spiritual journey as a progression from light into cloud into darkness. Moses goes up the mountain and enters what Gregory calls the divine darkness, but not a darkness you get lost in. God’s presence is so full, so overwhelming, that existing categories can’t process what you’re encountering. Because it’s impossible to name, we can only say what it is not. Or to put it another way: God can only be described on God’s own terms.
The apophatic move, then, is a practice. A discipline of unknowing. Of letting go of false images. Of clearing away every substitute we’ve placed between ourselves and the God who exceeds them.
Fasting, practiced in the apophatic key, is a way of saying: this is not God. The thing I’m reaching for, whether it’s food or comfort or distraction or my own sense of righteousness, is not the thing that satisfies the deepest need. Every time the reflex fires and you don’t follow it, you are doing apophatic theology with your whole body.
The Lenten discipline is clearing away every false god you’ve erected, including the most persistent false god of all: the one you see in the mirror, the one who whispers that if you just try hard enough, you can save yourself.
A word about grief
I want to name something carefully here, because it matters pastorally and it matters theologically. Some of us don’t choose the fast.
Grief does what fasting is supposed to do, except grief does it without asking permission. No one volunteers for it. When you lose someone, the world reorganizes itself around an absence you didn’t consent to. You are already holding something that nothing you can reach for will fill.
In this circumstance, the move, the only honest move, isn’t to try to spiritually leverage the grief. It’s to name it as a form of involuntary fast. To recognize that the gap you’re sitting in is a place where grace can work. Not because you’ve earned it or chosen it or done it right, but because grace works even in the most difficult places. Perhaps especially there.
The emptiness you didn’t choose is holy.
Just give up
You are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Maybe that isn’t only a memento mori. Maybe it’s also an invitation. An invitation to stop carrying the weight of your own salvation. To stop performing. To stop managing. To let go of the righteousness you’ve been assembling for yourself, the one that was never going to hold up anyway.
The burdens we put on ourselves are killing us. Jesus said so: Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
So for these forty days, just give up. Not in despair. In relief. Unclench the fists. Open the hands. Let the fast create the space. Sit in the ache. Don’t immediately fill it with something else, not even something spiritual and impressive.
Just be in the gap.
That’s where Gregory was heading when he talked about Moses entering the darkness. That’s where the apophatic tradition has always known that God meets us. Where the pretending stops. Where we come with nothing to offer but our actual need.
Come empty. Come honest. Come without your resume, without your performance, without the version of yourself you’ve been managing for other people.
That’s enough. It has always been enough.
Wow. Just wow. Everything I needed to hear.