A Music Fast Changed My Life—A Media Fast Might Heal Yours

Last updated on: January 16, 2025 at 10:55 am by Brian Grim Ph.D.

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A Music Fast Changed My Life—A Media Fast Might Heal Yours 2025-01-16T10:55:16-05:00 Brian Grim Ph.D.

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Fasting is more than just abstaining from food. | Image generated with AI by Irina Kozel, Adobe Stock #746036555

Fasting from Media

65% say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics according to Pew Research. Fasting from Media can revive us.

While some faiths such as Sikhism do not fast, numerous faith traditions practice fasting. Jews fast for 25 hours on Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av. Catholics and other Christian traditions have regular fasts, such as abstaining from meat on Fridays during Lent. Many Hindus fast on certain days of the month in devotion to particular deities.

Fasting is more than just abstaining from food in many traditions. During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, for example, devotees abstain from smoking and sex in addition to food and drink during daylight hours.

And a Catholic reflection on fasting captures its ultimate purpose: strengthening us for what lies ahead, which is nothing less than death and resurrection.

My 10-Month Fast

Three decades ago, I fasted for ten months, and it changed my life for good. It wasn’t a fast from food, but from music. It happened a few months after my wife, our four pre-teen kids, and I had just converted to Catholicism after being Southern Baptist missionaries.

We’d been working in China and the former Soviet Union from 1982-1993. But in 1994, during a year at home, we didn’t fit in with our Baptist church where music was the liturgy. That might seem a strange concept, but hymns are Baptist transmitters of theology and tradition. Worship centers around music, which always has designated spots in the service. But scripture reading did not. It was usually, in my experience, integrated with the sermon.

By contrast, every Catholic mass has readings from the Old Testament, a Psalm, an epistle and the Gospel. Music also has a very different role. The Psalm is sung, and depending on the priest, other parts of the liturgy are sung. Hymns are doctrinally optional as the mass itself is designed to be sung. In fact, praise & worship music that many other Christian traditions consider to be central to worship are not appropriate in a mass.

When I started my music fast, it was not so much of a conscious embrace of the Catholic understanding of worship and praise. It was more that my particular diet of repetitive praise & worship refrains with limited theological depth and breadth was limiting my spirituality and mind.

Before the Internet

Music accessibility in 1994 was primarily radio or CDs. There was no internet, Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. And radio was out given that we had moved back to Xinjiang, China. So, leaving our music CDs behind in the U.S., we started a 10 month journey without music.

Within weeks, a miraculous change happened in me. Verse flowed from my fountain pen like streams in a desert after a rain. My poems span the emotional and spiritual gambit and range from raw to whimsical.

For instance, as I meditated on the words of Jesus in that isolated part of China, an unlikely poem came forth, The Coffee Bean. Jesus’ words were: “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?” (Luke 9:23-25)

The Coffee Bean

I long for the days when I grew wild and free,
the days when the humans just liked to drink tea!
I’d ripen in sunshine, then fall to the ground:
by dying and drying my life would rebound.
From inside my shell I would send forth a sprout,
and after some seasons I’d be free to tout
a bush full of offspring all looking like me.
Beans, coffee beans, yes, a real family tree!

But woe to me now as I’m looking around,
trapped in glass grinder about to be ground
and put in some basket and scalded to death
with no chance to sprout or to leave a bequest!
A beverage most humans don’t think twice about,
unless by poor planning they must do without …
but please think of me who was once wild and free,
and free me by switching and drinking just tea.

Until then, I had never written a poem. I thought differently in poetry. I was free from myself — the self that was guided by tracks that played the same tunes over and over. The words of St. Ignatius of Loyola rang true: “The true religious is he who is wholly free not only from the world but from himself as well.” I ended up writing hundreds, maybe even thousands of poems. I consider them my treasury.

Challenge to a Media Fast

The music media fast that opened up a new and hopeful creative treasury in my life might be the antidote to the despair of polarization. It’s a big problem. Pew Research finds that “nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55% feel angry. By contrast, just 10% say they always or often feel hopeful about politics, and even fewer (4%) are excited.”

Indeed, research shows massive numbers of Americans are trapped in partisan echo chambers. Social and partisan media reinforce bias by providing a diet of repetitive refrains with limited depth and breadth that limit our spirituality and minds.

A media fast — be it 10 hours, 10 days or 10 months — can not only cure exhaustion and curb anger, it will open up the creative voices that are in your soul. And who knows, you might even find a poet inside.

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About Brian Grim, Ph.D.

Dr. Brian Grim is founding president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and global chair Dare to Overcome, a corporate diversity initiative that promotes mutual respect and engagement among differing groups in the workplace. Brian is the world’s leading expert on the relationship between economic sustainability and freedom of religion or belief for all (including those without a religious faith). You can read more about the author here.

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