One of the primary objectives of fasting, according to the biblical understanding, is self-denial, to deny what is essential for the body, by skipping a meal during the day. Both the Old and the New Testaments refer to fasting, which was being observed for various reasons. Even John the Baptist and Jesus are seen to be fasting in the Bible.

But given the present context, fasting is not something that is hard for people to observe. To skip a meal may mean better health, maintaining better equilibrium in the system, and it need not have any spiritual connotation. These days even physicians and dieticians recommend people to skip a mean to burn the extra fat one might have accumulated over the years and months.

Thus if we were to take the words of Jesus seriously and observe fast, by skipping a meal periodically, would we merit the graces of the Lent? Or are we expected to go beyond what Jesus has said in the Sermon on the Mount about the three simple means of being reconciled to God and people, and thus come closer to God?

It may be worthwhile if we consider what Jesus would have said if he had preached the Sermon on the Mount in today’s context. One of the main areas which is sweeping over the lives of the people of the modern age is the use of electronic gadgets. Even the remotest villages of the country is connected with the world through the internet and the mobile phone technology, and millions of people binge on it 24×7.

What Jesus might recommend for us today is e-fasting, to refrain from the use of these gadgets, which have taken us away from God and people, and have forced us to insulate ourselves in our own cocoons. It is by denying ourselves from their use, at least for a short period, we may be able to regain the lost strings of relationship with God and our neighbor.

What would the e-fasting mean to us today? For those who keep their mobile phones on round the clock, it might mean to keep it switched off at least for a few hours; for those who are used to being logged into the Facebook night and day, it would be to be logged off from the social network for at least a few of the waking hours. For those who indulge in chat over the mobile phone for hours, it would be spiritually uplifting to give it up at least for a few days. For those who sit in front of the ‘idiot-box’ for several hours, it is a real fast when they give up a few hours without being couch-potatoes!

Most of the urban youth find it extremely hard to switch off their smart phones, tablets or iPad. Facebook and WhatsApp have replaced their real-time, actual bonds of relationships. They would float in imaginary virtual world, caught in the web of virtual relationship, oblivious of the flesh and blood persons who are there just next to them, and who could keep them perched on to the branches where they belong.

For them the season of Lent can be truly a blessing, if they make an attempt to give up the gadgets for at least for a few hours each day, and engage in healthy face-to-face interaction with their parents, siblings, friends and relatives. These are the persons who would be by their side, when the virtual world might collapse and they might find themselves as e-waste on the information highways.

But the basic rule of observing e-fasting could be this: to engage in a genuine soul-searching to find what a person is attached inordinately and feels without which the person cannot survive; it could be anything or anyone, or it could even be ideas and strategies. The second step is to resolve to reduce the attachment in gradual steps, and this resolve should be specific, manageable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. The third step is to take small steps to work towards.

For a person who is inordinately attached to his or her smart phone, and cannot sleep without keeping it under the pillow, and had to look at it every time he/she wakes up to answer to nature’s call, the first attempt could be to keep it on the table and not under the pillow; the next day he or she could resolve not to look at it at the middle of the night, and the following day, could switch it off for an hour, and gradually increase the number of hours the phone is switched off, until one day he/she is able to switch off the phone when he/she is asleep.

It could be a challenge at the initial stage, but as one begins to see how this e-fasting is helping him/her to free from the virtual attachment s/he has built around a lifeless object.

When we are in e-fasting, we will begin to understand that by keeping the electronic gadgets switched off for a while does not bring the world to an end. When we return to the same virtual world after a few hours, there might not have been a dramatic change in the world that we had volunteered to be away from for a while. This could be a wonderful feeling to know that I need not bind myself to these gadgets which only curtail my freedom and self-will.

Julian Das

E-fasting can free us from all the human-made machines and systems, which keep binding us to their own control, in order to fill the pockets of some people, in whose hands everyone is made to look like a pawn on a chess board. It provides us with the satisfaction that true freedom is not so much to make use of everything at our disposal as we wish to, but to have the courage to say no to all that are death-promoting, death of the will-power, death of morality, death of creativity, death of individuality, and death of God at the core of our being.

Corruptio optimi pessima, says a Latin saying; the corruption of the best could become the worst, when it goes beyond the limit.

All that God has created under the sky are good, but they could rob us of our freedom and spirit if we allow them to be our masters. Let us begin to make use of them ‘tantum quantum’ – in as much as they take us closer to God and to our neighbors.

In this regard, e-fasting is a fine means to regain our lost freedom in the fanciful garden of gadgets and be reassert our right to be united with God and to our dear ones through the gift of reconciliation with the entire creation.

(Julian S Das is the editor of The Herald, Kolkata)