The Month of the Fast: Severance from All Save God

A retelling based on Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book, including a passage of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own.

The Bahá'í year is not measured as the world measures its years. It is divided into nineteen months of nineteen days each, and each month bears the name of an attribute of God. The very last of them — the month that closes the year and brings it round again to the renewal of spring — is called 'Alá', which means Loftiness. It is no accident that the month so named is the month of the Fast. For of all the disciplines that Bahá'u'lláh laid upon His followers, fasting is the one that most plainly turns the soul away from the earth and lifts it toward the heights.

The outward form of the Fast is simple, and Esslemont sets it down plainly. During the nineteen days of this final month the believer abstains from both food and drink from sunrise to sunset. The month falls always at the same season, ending at the spring equinox, so that the Fast never lands in the deep heat of summer nor the bitter cold of winter, when real hardship might result; and at that season, near the equinox, the hours between sunrise and sunset are nearly the same across the whole habitable globe. It is a law tempered with mercy. The Fast is not binding upon those for whom it would be a burden too heavy to bear: not upon children, nor upon the sick, nor upon travellers, nor upon the aged and the weak, nor upon women who are with child or nursing their infants. The God who commands the discipline has no wish to break the bodies of those who keep it.

But the body is not where the meaning of the Fast resides — and this is the matter on which Esslemont is most careful to be clear. There is, he allows, much to suggest that a periodic fast of this kind is good for the health, a wholesome measure of physical hygiene. Yet that is not its purpose, and to mistake the purpose is to miss the whole of it. Just as the reality of the Fast, he writes, does not lie in the consumption of physical food but in "the commemoration of God, which is our spiritual food," so the reality of the Fast does not consist in mere abstention from eating and drinking, however much that may help to purify the body. The reality lies in "the abstention from the desires and lusts of the flesh, and in severance from all save God."

There is the heart of it: severance from all save God. The hunger of the daylight hours is a teacher, and what it teaches is detachment. A person who goes without bread from dawn to dusk is reminded, hour upon hour, that he is not the slave of his appetites — that the clamouring of the body can be heard, acknowledged, and quietly set aside for the sake of something higher. And what is learned of the body is meant to be learned, by extension, of the whole restless wanting of the self: the craving for comfort, for praise, for possession, for the thousand small gratifications by which the soul is kept tied to the dust. The Fast loosens those ties, one day at a time, for nineteen days, until the believer stands a little freer, a little lighter, a little more lofty in spirit than before.

Esslemont preserves, on this very point, words of 'Abdu'l-Bahá that go to the root of the whole practice. "Fasting is a symbol," 'Abdu'l-Bahá said. "Fasting signifies abstinence from lust. Physical fasting is a symbol of that abstinence, and is a reminder; that is, just as a person abstains from physical appetites, he is to abstain from self-appetites and self-desires." The discipline of the mouth is an outward sign of a discipline of the heart. To go without food is only the visible token; the thing it points to is the turning away of the soul from its own demands and toward its Lord. "But mere abstention from food," He added, "has no effect on the spirit. It is only a symbol, a reminder. Otherwise it is of no importance."

That last warning is as important as the practice itself, and 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not soften it. The Fast is not an exercise in self-punishment, nor a contest to see who can endure the most. It is not, He made plain, a call to extreme and ruinous abstinence. "Fasting for this purpose does not mean entire abstinence from food," He said. "The golden rule as to food is, do not take too much or too little. Moderation is necessary." He pointed to a sect in India whose members practised abstinence so extreme that they reduced their food until they lived on almost nothing — and whose minds, He observed, suffered for it. "A man is not fit to do service for God with brain or body if he is weakened by lack of food. He cannot see clearly." The aim is not to grind the body down. The aim is to free the spirit. A wisely kept Fast leaves a person not depleted but clarified — emptied of the heaviness of self, and so more able to be filled with the remembrance of God.

This is why the month is called Loftiness, and why it stands where it stands, at the very end of the year. The year has carried the believer through all the attributes of God in their turn; now, in its final stretch, it asks for the one thing that gathers the others up. It asks for detachment — for the willingness to release, freely and for love's sake, the grip of the lower self, so that the higher self may rise. And then, when the nineteen days are complete and the sun sets on the last of them, the equinox turns, the new year dawns, and the Fast gives way at once to the joy of the festival of Naw-Rúz. The renunciation comes first; the rejoicing follows. The soul that has learned, even a little, to live above its own appetites is the soul made ready for the gladness of a new beginning.

To fast, in the Bahá'í understanding, is therefore not finally a matter of an empty stomach. It is a matter of an emptied heart — emptied of all save the remembrance of the Beloved, and lifted, for those nineteen quiet and demanding days, toward the Loftiness whose name the month bears.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/other-literature/historical/bahaullah-and-the-new-era/