Colloquy, Volume 14 #4

Available in My Heart to the Poor

I have always avoided serious fasting, being not only quite addicted to food but also thoroughly convinced that I was hypoglycemic and therefore had to eat constantly. Yet when I first heard about the Fast for Fairness, a national protest against the implementation of the Canadian Health and Social Transfer (CHST) which effectively ends national standards for our social programs, it drew me in a way no other "action" had in some time. The campaign was initiated by the National Anti-Poverty Organization and was supported by the national social movement coalitions, including the Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice. I was one of the hundreds of Christians who felt compelled to get involved.

I'm an activist who has been working in the area of women's economic rights for several years. I had been involved in the fight against the CHST, as well as welfare cuts in British Columbia, both involving serious violations of the basic human right to income security and further increasing the feminization of poverty. One day in early February I was listening to CBC radio and heard a seasonal worker from Prince Edward Island sobbing because she and her husband couldn't make their payments or feed their children. I woke up when I heard her cries of rage. My heart had become numb with all the statistics and political rhetoric; people were suffering and hungry, and things were only going to get worse. These cuts were profoundly morally wrong and I had to do something that was more concrete, more tangible and perhaps less comfortable than sign a petition or write a letter.

The Fast for Fairness offered me the possibility of taking a visible stand. I suddenly understood Jesus' words to his disciples when they were unable to cast out the demon in the young boy: "This type can be driven out only by prayer and fasting" (Mk 9:29; Mt 17:21). I recalled what Gandhi had said: "My religion teaches me that before a distress that no one can relieve, one ought to fast and pray."

Underemployed like many Canadians and with my son away from home, I was free to take five days at the end of March and join Sandy Cameron who was publicly fasting in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery for the week. Fearful that the fast would prove too difficult for me, I was amazed at how I slowly was able to move into it. I was accustomed to filling up with food the way I filled up with information, books, things--anything to avoid emptiness. As the fast approached, however, I found my body wanted less food. I experienced the fast as a way of emptying myself, of moving to my heart and away from my stomach at the centre of my universe.

As the week went on I experienced this emptiness at a deeper level. The busyness of my postmodern world had made it very difficult for me to be available, in my heart, to anyone, much less the poor. Now I sat for hours on the steps of the Art Gallery, handing out leaflets and talking to antipoverty activists, Christians and other passersby who stopped to join us, chat or ask questions. I realized that I was becoming available. I was focused on a single issue and I was clear, in a way I couldn't be in my usual busy life of faxes, e-mail, appointments and work.

The public nature of the fast also had spiritual implications at a communal level. Each day we were joined by various people who were fasting for one or more days. It was a binding experience to fast with others, and it made it a lot easier. I was aware that some were caught in the tension between the private and public fast, between the need to fast publicly as moral witness and the importance of avoiding the sin of pride. For me public fasting was and is a form of symbolic direct action, a type of "somatic politics" that we are called on to engage in as Christians, a call to put our bodies on the line.

The value of the Fast for Fairness was not in its results. We did not stop the implementation of the CHST on April 1. The media ignored us, even as the names of hundreds who were fasting were sent to the prime minister. The biblical blessing of "those who hunger for righteousness" is promised not to the outcome but to the work itself. For one short week we were a "cloud of witnesses" who stretched our own humanity and said a firm "no" to the present direction of economic policies and a "yes" to the Reign of God.

Learning to Notice God's Heaven

Anorexia, the disease of self-starvation, in some ways oddly resembles alcoholism, the disease of consumption gone wild. The two are lifelong sicknesses that go into remission only after the sufferer manages to escape self-loathing long enough to discover a loving presence in the world outside herself. This loving presence might be the Christian God, a great spirit, or the natural world taken as a whole. Confidence in this presence enables the alcoholic to put a cork in her desire to drink and gives the anorexic strength to pry the lid off an obsessive self-control that condemns her to a life of endless hunger.

I have been an anorexic since the age of seventeen when my weight plunged from 160 to about 115 pounds in just a few months. I know very well how my no-eating compulsion started. My mother's constant nagging about the need to "slim down" was one of the chief leitmotivs of my childhood. I was convinced that my fat self was ugly and worthless even though I was a strong academic achiever who always had the highest marks in the class. I recently found a photo of myself at the age of six or seven--a chubby-faced girl with a slight smile and my naturally straight hair so tightly curled that it's a wonder the photo doesn't scream at me in pain even after all these years. Right under the picture I had at some point scrawled UGH!!! in big red letters.

The paradox of my teenage weight loss was that even then I didn't satisfy my mother. Instead of emerging as a teenage beauty queen I became skeletal and chronically gloomy. I stopped getting my period for a few months. Some of my hair fell out too; that was no fun. This is the cruel snare that traps all anorexics. Their frantic efforts to be pretty make them hideous instead. Now that I am an anorexic-in-remission, one of my big temptations is to hate my mother as much as I used to hate myself.

My teenage anorexia cleared up without my ever dealing with it directly. It dissipated after I left home to go to university, where I found friends, fun and engrossing studies. By the time I graduated from the University of Toronto, I was cheerful at least some of the time and slightly overweight. I retained many anorexic characteristics which at the time I did not identify as such, chief among them an irresistible urge to overregulate my life.

Full-blown anorexia came back to me about ten years later, in the late 1970s, now fiercer than ever because I had learned nothing about how to handle it during my first bout. It surfaced during trips to Latin America, where I kept up a hectic pace and constantly skimped on food. On a trip in 1980 my weight slid from 140-odd pounds to 118 in about two months. Along with the no-eating compulsion, I was ravaged by a black, all-encompassing depression that sucked every negative thought I ever had right to the centre of my brain. My psyche became a wilderness sealed tight with barbed wire like Auschwitz and bombed to smithereens like Hiroshima. Still I was never seriously suicidal. My drive to keep on working was stronger that the need to do myself in.

Then some good genie--my chiropractor I think--gave me the idea of doing yoga. My unstoppable diligence made it fairly easy for me to go to classes twice a week for about three years. It was through the discipline of yoga that I eventually learned to "undiscipline" myself enough to notice the sun, moon and stars in God's heaven. I came to enjoy smelling flowers--yes, even me, the frantically busy 1960s flower child who never had time to put flowers in her hair. I learned to meditate and chant, and also to pray. I shall always remember a class I attended late one afternoon in 1981, when I suddenly experienced a brief surge of happiness for the first time in well over a year. (Now I think it may have been the first moment of real happiness in my life.) Hey, this is okay, I thought, but I was afraid to tell anyone about it. Later on, the moments of happiness became longer and more frequent.

To this day, I firmly believe that yoga is the miracle cure for practically everything. If prisoners in maximum-security institutions could be induced to do yoga regularly, they would in time become sweetly mellow. Maybe this prognosis is naïvely sanguine; still, I believe yoga enables you to see the good and beauty everywhere in the world around you.

I'm convinced that now I have the best of both worlds. I'm still anorexic enough that I watch my weight with hawklike vigilance and work with Sisyphean relentlessness. Yet I am also able to receive the amazing grace that lets me love the world, myself and my nagging mother. Even if I had the choice, I wouldn't rid myself entirely of my feverish anorexic energy.