Week 6 Desire
Fasting
Learning you are not the slave of your cravings.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.
Matthew 5:6Read these slowly, aloud, before you say anything of your own.
Gastrimargia
Gluttony
The Desiring Faculty
The anxious urge to overconsume and hoard — to secure yourself by feeding yourself.
Gluttony isn’t only about food. The desert fathers saw it as the first foothold of the desiring soul — the reflex to soothe every discomfort by consuming something: food, snacks, screens, videos, more, now. It promises to fill you and leaves you needing the next hit.
Fasting is the direct attack: you feel the craving, you don’t obey it, and you discover you don’t die. ‘Hunger and thirst for righteousness’ takes that same engine — desire — and aims it at God, the one hunger that actually gets satisfied: ‘they shall be filled.’ Every growl becomes a reminder: I am hungrier than this for God.
What’s one craving that feels like it runs you — that you obey the second you feel it?
Most things you really want never actually satisfy you. Why do you think that is?
Fasting • the skill of consolation & desolation
Back to Ignatius, stuck in his bed. As he read, he noticed his insides kept shifting. When he daydreamed about his old life — glory, partying, conquest — it was exciting in the moment but left him flat and empty afterward. When he imagined giving his life to God, the joy stayed. Same man, same bed — two completely different inner trails.
The tradition gives these names. Consolation: an increase of faith, hope, and love — a settled, alive pull toward God. Desolation: the opposite — heaviness, discouragement, a sense God is far away. Tell your guys plainly: desolation is normal. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with them, or that God left. Fasting makes these movements loud, so you can learn to read them.
A word of care: with teenagers, be wise about food fasting. For some it’s good practice; for athletes, or anyone with any history around food, a screen, game, or habit fast is the far better call. Default to those unless you know the young man and his family are fully on board.
Voices from the desert, the cloister, and the long line of men who walked this road before you.
“Fasting is the support of our soul; it gives us wings to mount up high.”
John Chrysostom · Homilies on Fasting c. 347–407
“Resist the beginnings; the remedy comes too late when the evil has gained strength by long delay.”
Thomas à Kempis · The Imitation of Christ 1380–1471
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
C. S. Lewis · Mere Christianity 1898–1963
“More than any other Discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us.”
Richard Foster · Celebration of Discipline b. 1942
A word for you, the one who leads — how this lands in a thirteen-year-old's real week.
At this age the wanting gets loud — food, phones, games, attention, and yes, sexual desire. The lie underneath all of it is, ‘I have to obey every craving the second I feel it.’ Fasting disproves that lie in the most direct way possible: you feel the want, you don’t act, and you don’t die. You’re bigger than your cravings.
That’s one of the most freeing things a young man can learn. Keep the fast doable and lean toward screens and habits over food. And keep returning to the language of consolation and desolation — it gives them a map for an interior life they’ve never had words for.
When have you done something ‘fun’ that left you emptier afterward, like Ignatius’s daydreams?
What’s one thing you could fast from for a few days — and what might that teach you?