However the gift of fasting, prayer, and nonviolent resistance is that those who experience them become transformed. Their commitment to their cause intensifies because they have lived some part of the cause itself, and they are compelled to create a ripple that can lead to a new direction. On occasion, even decision makers are moved to change.

Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer, a faster from Norwich, Conn., said this: “I’m not doing this to focus on how it feels to not eat. I’m doing this in protest of eight years of unjust imprisonment. Of eight years of no rights, no freedoms, destroyed lives. How much of my life has changed in the last eight years that I take for granted? What would I have missed? To see my daughter every day is the biggest blessing of my life. This imprisonment has not only stopped fathers from seeing their daughters and sons, but it has stopped these men from creating lives, families, children.

“I fast because I can. I have that choice.

We can make it worthwhile by being heard. This isn’t for us, it’s for others. ‘No one is free while others are oppressed.’” There has been no change in the reality of President Obama’s 2009 statement that the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has weakened national security and served as a rallying call for enemies. These are wise words from a thoughtful man. He would do well to heed them, and we would do well to hold him to his words.

Diane Lopez Hughes is a Springfield peace and justice activist who joined the fast.