1 Ramadan 1441: Back, Turning Toward the Opening

It is You alone… [1:5]

The morning fog burned off quickly and the sun was already high when I stepped outside. The bugs hovered, dancing on the yard where Alqo naps in our small yard. The light hit the grass in an ethereal way, hidden for a few days behind storm clouds that never unleashed themselves over us. This will be a different day.

I’ve been away from the fasting feeling; my stomach hasn’t known hunger pangs for awhile. To tell the truth, it didn’t experience them the last time this auspicious month came around in Germany. I was at the tail-end of a theological detox, though spiritually and experientially quite satirized and inflated, without any of the underpinnings of organized faith.

More sure of myself and my surroundings, I approached this month with the hope of a restart. Being disconnected from society by both choice and and now circumstances, I’ve become so grateful in our household’s rhythms; the morning bread, after-work lunch watching re-runs of Friends, the walks in the woods, reading time in my hammock, watching my partner tend her small garden, eating almost vegan save for a few of the neighbors’ eggs.

Surely, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the differences between the night and the day, and the ships that sail in the sea for the benefit of the people, and what God has sent down of water from the sky so He brings the earth back to life after it had died, and He sent forth from it every creature, and the dispatching of the winds and the clouds that have been commissioned between the earth and the sky are signs for a people who comprehend. [2:164]

The signs that lead us around this earth, that point the way to this or that action, the coincidences that occur all throughout, the current, constrained environment, this first day of Ramadan is a reminder of whence they originated. Now, Providence has given us the opportunity to test out Pascal’s diagnosis of humanity’s problems, turn inwards, probe our assumptions about how the world is to be structured, rethink our relationship to the Earth, to each other, and in doing so, to the One who brought all of this about.

So I’ll turn inward. Ramadan mubarak to all.