Crossing Over For Ramadan

I am connecting with a couple dozen folks of faith and conscience who are crossing over and committing to some form of fast during the daylight hours of Ramadan. It’s a small step towards strengthening our solidarity with Muslims in Gaza, the West Bank and around the world. We are giving up food or caffeine or alcohol or sex or something else - or all of the above. I am abstaining from eating food and scrolling on espn.com and social media. Our goal is simply to deepen our spiritual and political commitments to collective liberation.

A week before Ramadan, we joined a protest for Palestine in Orange County. There were probably five hundred "protestors" taking up the four corners of a suburban intersection, filled with flags and beautiful signs. When I parked and started walking over, a teenage boy walked beside me with a huge smile on his face. He told me he just left his mosque and he drove by the protest and just had to stop and join in. He said he did not know it was happening and he could not believe how big it was. That young Muslim man melted my heart - so did many of the other people, mostly Arab-Americans, in the small crowds on each corner. 

We are one week into Ramadan. In the waves of early afternoon weakness, I have consistently been washed over with feelings of deep respect and reverence for the fact that Muslims fast during the daylight hours for an entire month every single year. I continue to hear about this Palestinian virtue they call “sumud.” It means something like steadfastness or resilience. Ramadan must play a crucial role in cultivating their capacity to creatively resist what the Western world has done to them for the past century.

This whole thing is just so damn inconvenient. I traveled this week from Orange County back to Detroit. Time zones could care less about Ramadan. It’s been hard, the past three days, to wake up before the butt crack of dawn to eat my bowl of oatmeal. The clock says 6:30am, but my body feels a lot more like 3:30am. There were two times this week that I really wanted to eat French fries off the plates of the people I went to lunch with – and the plates of people sitting at other tables too. Ramadan has helped me realize more that I have a really hard time holding the holy tension between discipline and pleasure. I also see, more clearly, that I have this strong tendency to just follow the rules - instead of feeling what is going on inside me. 

 

More than anything, I am spurred on towards love and good deeds by being connected to other non-Muslim people who are breaking rank with conventional wisdom and participating in Ramadan. This tradition too easily becomes an individual spiritual practice for me. I know in my head that Ramadan is a deeply relational and communal experience, embedded in the fabric of Islamic culture. But my habits are held captive to a Western world fueled by fragmenting supremacy stories. Ramadan offers the real thing, what my soul hungers for most: a consistent, cohesive connection with others - where Something Else is experienced together..