Fast times.

Because of my Catholic education (first grade through graduate school), I am, at seventy, a deeply religious liberal. The Sisters of St. Joseph who presided over my grammar school actually taught us grammar, the foundation of the liberal arts in the Catholic intellectual tradition. And they taught us the foundations of the spiritual life as well: the cardinal and the theological virtues. My most vivid and perhaps telling memory of those years is of my eighth-grade teacher, Sr. Dorothy, walking in one day after recess, ashen-faced, and asking us to kneel at our desks to pray for "Mr. Gandhi, a very holy man, who has just been shot."

This happened at a time many U.S. Catholics were barely civil to their Protestant neighbors, let alone concerned about Hindus on the other side of the world. Little did we know that Gandhi had been assassinated by a fellow Hindu, upset with Gandhi's tolerance of Islam.

Later, in high school, our Crosier instructors encouraged us to read Newman, the papal encyclicals, The Commonweal (as it was then called), and an endless list of great books. In our science classes, we learned about Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian priest who was trying to convince Einstein about the plausibility of the Big Bang theory. At the same time, we were immersed in the life of the liturgy, instructed in meditation, and even taught to appreciate leisure as the basis of a liberal education.

In college, and later in graduate school, these seeds blossomed into what my teacher Fr. William McNiff called Christian humanism. Because we learned to think not simply logically but by using the analogical imagination central to Catholic understanding, we were never vulnerable to modern reductionism or to religious fundamentalism. From the fathers of the church, for example, we learned to evaluate not just the literal sense of the Scriptures, but their moral, allegorical, and anagogical levels. Today, when fundamentalists around the world, whether Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish, would rather throw their children and ours into the fires of hatred and unreason, we would do well to recall Jesus' advice to his disciples about how to deal with such forces.

Recall Mark 9, where the disciples tried to cure a child who was being thrown into the fire by demons, but failed. In explaining why, Jesus said, "This kind [of demon] can be driven out only by prayer and fasting." If we are to address the political and religious ideologies savaging the world today, we can't do it by simply appealing to the Enlightenment notions of pluralism and tolerance.

While these are important and useful values, particularly in democratic societies, they lack sufficient spiritual grounding to address the conflicts we face today. In The Human Adventure, Fr. William McNamara tells the story of meeting Abraham Joshua Heschel in New York during Vatican II. Heschel told the monk he was concerned about the direction of the council. Asked why, the rabbi responded: "How many of your bishops are contemplatives?" It is only out of stillness, Heschel noted--the wei wu wei of Lao Tzu and other mystics--that fountains of living water well up.

Prayer and fasting enlarge our appetite for the spiritual nourishment that alone can address the ideological and religious fanaticisms dividing the world today. Fasting, like prayer, can take a variety of forms, from limiting food intake to abstaining from the constant clatter of our electronic culture. During the first days of Hitler's rise to power, Max Picard wrote a small book about silence. He observed that Hitler was constantly on the radio spewing out hypnotic messages of power and hatred. Unless people turned off their sets, Picard warned, Hitler would take over Germany.

This is not to say that total abstinence from the media is what is required today, only that some forms of restraint may help us weigh and evaluate the seductive ideas relentlessly being foisted on us. Prayer and fasting do not separate us from the world. On the contrary, they draw us into it, giving us a keener sense of perspective and of understanding. As Gandhi knew, and Sr. Dorothy intuited, tools like these help us to be the change we want to see in the world.

James D. Poisson, a retired Catholic school teacher, is a freelance writer who lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island.