Gabriel Knipp

Fasting and Feasting

Fasting and feasting. For thousands of years, humans have observed periods of both. Feast days were remembrances; holy days meant to shape us by the way we observe and celebrate them. On the other side of this were days of fasting, rituals of sacrifice, the remembrance that life is not meant to be lived from one high to the next.

Part of the over saturation of the holiday season is that we have not earned it. Advent, rather than a period of waiting and hoping, becomes a period of holiday parties and buying presents. Twelve days of Christmas becomes the lethargy between Christmas and New Years: cold weather, big meals, a feast after feast.

But what if our souls, like a balloon freshly pulled from the bag, can only take so much air of feasting? What if it needs the stretching of fasting first? I do not necessarily mean food, though that counts — but abstaining from our impulses. We live in a society that celebrates almost every impulse and says it is good, and by the time December rolls around we are saturated and full. No wonder that New Years is a time for half-hearted resolutions. We instinctively know these rhythms of feasting and fasting, but our time is not marked to them. In six weeks, whatever resolutions we embarked upon (studies show) will be tossed out, overwhelmed by the need to keep feasting. Buy. Go out to eat. Stay busy and productive. Fill your lives to excess.

Without finding ways to fast, feasting will over saturate us and yet leave us feeling empty.
Courage Through Fear

We must connect to our fears if we are to become courageous.

Dodging fear is easier. Not writing is easier than writing, and there are 1,000 reasons not to write — from the fact that the bedroom is messy to you should probably call your mom. It’s been too long.

The way to courage, however, is not around fear but through it. We do not become people of courage by skirting our fears, by stuffing them, by believing they do not matter. We become people of courage by courting our fears. Asking about them and how they’re doing. Staring our fears in the eyes.

Asking, of course, why they are there in the first place.

To skirt around our fears is to compensate. Hem and haw. It gives them more power. This is the same thing that happens when we ignore our fears altogether: they produce an unseen effect on our lives, a current against which we paddle and continue to end up in the same place. The same eddy where we are not moving forward.

The first step to traveling in water with a current is to look at it. See where waves break. Watch the flow. See where it will push one way or the other; see where it will slide you into a rock or pull you into depths. Only after studying it do you know the terrain and how to get where you want to go.

Our fears are a current. The more you study them, the more you can get where you want to go.
From Head to Heart

As a society, we have a fractured relationship with our own hearts. We tamp them down in the name of productivity. We celebrate and allow certain emotions, but only to an extent. Some vulnerability is good, but tears can get messy. Passion is nice, but anger has no place.

But our hearts are not interested in the mores of society. They are interested in life, in feeling and experiencing it, in all of it. Tears and anger. We cannot live lives of courage (coming from the Latin for, you guessed it, heart) without connecting to our hearts.

When I ask myself what I am feeling, the answer is often: I don’t know. I live in my head. Asking the question is a start, and physical sensation is an entryway. Hot. A stab in my right shoulder. The chair against my thighs.

The secret, at least for me — and for novelists and storytellers — is that we access the emotional through the physical, and vice versa. The stab in my shoulder, a tension I’ve been carrying. Like a backpack. The first step to reconnecting to our hearts: asking how we feel. Feeling it.

And if we live too much focused on our own productivity and output, rather than the input that gives us life: feeling is input. It is connection. Feeling is experiencing life.
Output vs. Input

Our culture measures output. Gross domestic product. The Dow Jones Industrial Average. Return on investment. What we do in the macro we do in the micro: measuring an individual’s life by his or her accomplishments. We write biographies about those who achieved in the public arena. The others of us don’t get biographies.

Naturally, output is a terrible way to measure a life. Take Jesus as an example: he never wrote anything; he never achieved any sort of political power; he never had much money. Those who most deeply change culture seem utterly unconcerned with output. They do not measure life that way.

They do, however, seem concerned with input. Jesus regularly took time away to be with his Father. He took time with community. If we began measuring the quality of what goes into ourselves — from the quality of food to the quality of thought — we would find that we are much more than what we can produce. Inputs like good meals and good books and slow afternoons would, over time, make us wholly different people.
Tension + Grace

Most Sundays, I jot down some notes about the upcoming week. I think through what I want to write or do. I write values down, things like Engage creative tension. This reminds me that one of the ways I want to live is to feel the tension around creativity: it’s hard to create things, whether alone or as a group. I do both a lot.

Each Thursday or Friday, I find myself surviving. The week didn’t go as planned. I didn’t have acres of creative time. Maybe a few square feet. At work, emails poured in and I did the daily work of deciding which to respond to and which to leave in my inbox while I think about them. There’s no optimism like thinking I’ll get to that email later this week. It’s a hopeless optimism: I don’t want to respond to it now, why would I later? Even more, it’s an optimism that forgets I’ll get 20 more of those types of emails between now and “later this week.”

On Thursday nights or Friday mornings, I’ve forgotten about my goals. They’ve shifted a dozen times. Some of this is good an natural. Things come up. Sometimes I ignore them and focus on bigger goals. Sometimes I find myself shifting from one task to the next, just trying not to drop too many things.

This, too, is a creative tension. The weekly rhythm of focus and distraction. For me, it comes as I get a little behind on sleep and behind on tasks. I don’t have a pat answer to this — maybe some time refocusing on Wednesday or Thursday, which sometimes happens and slows the slide. The best answer that I have thus far?

Grace. Reminding myself that I am not perfect. That my attention to my own goals will not come at 100% all the time, that moving forward imperfectly is much better than constantly reassessing my own process. This week, Thursday and Friday are coming. They are reminders that I need grace as much as I need goals.
What vs. How

At one point in his work, Jesus sends out a group of people. Some texts say it’s 72; some say it’s 70. Only the book of Luke records this act; both Luke and Matthew record Jesus sending a smaller number. Luke seems to be telling us that the movement is growing, that the sending continues.

We get a locker room talk. A coach giving final instructions before a game. Or, maybe you’re into war movies: a general offering battle plans. The group is gathered and listening closely. What does Jesus say?

He talks about prayer. He spends an inordinate amount of time on what bags to bring or not bring, what to say when you enter a house. What to eat. Where to stay. Out of the 13 verses that Luke devotes to these final instructions, one tells these 72 what to do. Heal the sick and proclaim the kingdom.

The rest of this pre-game speech is about posture. It’s about how to show up. Be in prayer. This is urgent. Bring peace. Don’t play favorites. Reading between the lines, or if you were there that day and impatient to get going, you would hear: how we show up is as important as what we do. Or, let me go further: how we show up is more important.

In our society, we spend an inordinate amount of time talking and thinking about what we do. Our calling. Our titles. When we tell someone about ourselves, we often begin with our jobs. It’s safe. It’s convention.

But what if our real impact—not just in the here and now, but echoing into people’s lives and impacting one person and another—is much more about how? How we care? How we create? How we love?

You could make a strong argument this is where Jesus focuses.
Rituals Remind Us

We are not simply brains walking about, but bodies. This is why ritual is important. We have more Pavlovian responses than we realize. Our bodies are tuned to get hungry at certain times, to grow tired at certain times, and these rhythms are similar to others but unique to us.

Ritual is essential to creativity because it engages the body. Each morning, I wake and make a cup of coffee in my Aeropress, I pray and journal, and I write. The ritual is the coffee. Walking downstairs and turning on the electric kettle, pouring it over the grounds. I often study the crema on top of the coffee, iridescent in the kitchen light, bubbles rising and popping into the air.

The rumble of the kettle. The smell of ground coffee. The way the bubbles catch the light. The feel as I press the coffee into the cup, leaning gently into it. The best rituals engage multiple senses. Lighting a candle: the scratch of the match, the scent of smoke, the flickering flame.

Rituals prepare and attune us. They do so for writing sessions, for times of prayer, even for meetings. They create liminal spaces where we can transition into the next moment, which may even be another ritual. Rituals help us create habits. Rituals are a reminder that we are human, with the dignity (and sometimes burden) of a body, and all our creativity flows from that body.

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