Ramadan began yesterday. Set by the moon, Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar year, which is why it moves around in our solar calendared year. You have already heard something of the practices and customs of this time and now we’ll further explore the meanings of Ramadan both in their Islamic context and in a wider, improvisational context. This is the second in our year-long look at holidays and holy days, a part of our Unitarian Universalist practice to seek meaning in all religions.
Islam has five pillars which prescribe the duties of a Muslim. These pillars instruct Muslims to believe in the oneness of Allah and that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah, to pray five times a day, to give aid to the poor and those in need, to fast as a means of self-purification, and to make a pilgrimage to Mecca once in their lifetimes. The fasting days of Ramadan were established by the Quran, which says: "Ramadan is the month during which the Quran was revealed, (by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad), providing guidance for the people, clear teachings, and the statute book. Those of you who witness this month shall fast therein. Those who are ill or traveling may substitute the same number of other days. God wishes for you convenience, not hardship, that you may fulfill your obligations, and to glorify God for guid ing you, and to express your appreciation. When My servants ask you about Me, I am always near. I answer their prayers when they pray to Me. The people shall respond to Me and believe in Me, in order to be guided. [2:180ff] . . . We revealed it (Quran) in the Night of Power. How awesome is the Night of Power! The Night of Power is better than a thousand months. The angels and the Spirit descend therein, by their Lord's leave, to carry out every command. Peaceful it is until the advent of the dawn.” (97)
“Ramadan is a special month of the year for over one billion Muslims throughout the world. . . . Muslims think of it as a kind of tune-up for their spiritual lives. There are as many meanings of Ramadan as there are Muslims.” (www.submission.org) Rumi, the Sufi teacher, (Sufism is known as the mystical branch of Islam) wrote:
O moon-faced Beloved, the month of Ramadan has arrived. Cover the table and open the path of praise. O fickle busy-body, it’s time to change your ways. Can you see the one who’s selling the halvah; how long will it be the halvah you desire? Just a glimpse of the halvah-maker has made you so sweet even honey says “I’ll put myself beneath your feet, like soil; I’ll worship at your shrine.” Your chick frets within the egg with all your eating and choking. Break out of your shell that your wings may grow. Let20yourself fly. The lips of the Master are parched from calling the Beloved. The sound of your call resounds through the horn of yo ur empty belly. Let nothing be inside of you. Be empty: give your lips to the lips of the reed. When like a reed you fill with his breath, then you’ll taste sweetness. Sweetness is hidden in the Breath that fills the reed. Be like Mary -- by that sweet breath a child grew within her.
What is the purpose of Ramadan? There are many. In order to mark the time of revelation of the Quran, fasting from sunrise to sunset becomes a spiritual and physical discipline. Abstention from food, water, smoking, and sexual intercourse strengthens self-control and allows focus upon praying and reciting the Quran, which help to move one closer to Allah. Emptying oneself physically makes room for the sweet spiritual breath to enter. Omid Safi, of Colgate University, wrote on the Speaking of Faith website (www.speakingoffaith.publicradio.org): “My mom, God bless her precious heart, would get up at 4 in the Ramadan morning and cook sahari for us. We got to have date omelets, which must have at least eight thousand calories. . . . Happiness on a table, served up at 4:30 a.m. We lived for that meal. We were not allowed to have date omelets at any other time of the20year, no matter how much we begged for it. . . . Ramadan was, and continues to be, a more spiritual time around our households. People are a bit more considerate, a bit more mindful. Fewer arguments over the TV remote. Even my family members who did not do the regular five-times-a-day prayers fasted. To not fast would be ... rude. Ramadan is about food, and it is about more than food. It is about cleansing one's heart and soul. People watch what they say, what they listen to, what they look at. The words were spoken with a bit more compassion, and folks ended arguments before they began by reminding each other that it was Ramadan. My father used to tell us that fasting was a privilege. He said that we chose to not eat from sun up to sundown, whereas there are people in the world for whom not eating lunch or snacks was a daily fact of life. In being hungry, we are to feel their pain and suffering. He would often repeated this Persian poem by Sa'di (from The Rose Garden):
The Children of Adam are members of one body, made from the same source. If one feels pain, the others can not be indifferent to it. If you are unmoved by the suffering of others, you are not worthy of the name human being.”
The practices of the month of Ramadan, taken as a whole, are a means of surrendering oneself to Allah, of submission. Fasting is a powerful undertaking, as any of us know who have done it. We move into a different relationship with our bodies, with our hunger, with our cravings, with the physical deprivation we have chosen. The very physical reality of it has power. The word Islam means submission, or surrender. Fasting, undertaken for religious reasons, is a surrender of the physical to the spiritual. Allah will guide humanity if we will give ourselves over to Allah. I think a devout Muslim trusts Allah to take care of us and show us the way. The Quran is the word of God as revealed to God’s Prophet Muhammad. The 7th century Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca of the dominant Kuraish (Quraysh) tribal federation. He was orphaned soon after birth, and brought up by his uncle. He married Khadija, a wealthy widow much his senior and with her had his only child, his daughter Fatima. Muhammad was a wealthy merchant, but at age 40, felt himself commanded by God to preach. Throughout his life he continued to have revelations. Thus the Quran was revealed to him during the month of Ramadan.
“In his first years Muhammad made few converts but many enemies. From about 620, Mecca became actively hostile, since much of its revenues depended on its pagan shrine, the Kaaba, and an attack on the existing Arab religion was an attack on the prosperity of Mecca. While he was gaining only enemies at home, Muhammad's teaching was faring little better abroad; . . . In the summer of 622 Muhammad fled from Mecca as an attempt was being prepared to murder him, and he escaped in the night from the city and made his way to Yathrib. From this event, the flight, or Hegira, of the Prophet (622), the Islamic calendar begins. Muhammad spent the rest of his life at Yathrib, henceforth called Medina, the City of the Prophet. At Medina he built his model theocratic state and from there ruled his rapidly growing empire.” A struggle between Mecca and Medina took place over a number of years but Muhammad eventually prevailed and Mecca became the holiest city of Islam.
As he believed firmly in his position as last of the prophets and as successor of Jesus, Muhammad seems at first to have expected that the Jews and Christians would welcome him and accept his revelations, but he was soon disappointed. Medina had a large Jewish population which controlled most of the wealth of the city, and they steadfastly refused to give their new ruler any kind of religious allegiance. Muhammad, after a long quarrel, appropriated much of their property, and his first actual conquest was the oasis of Khaibar, occupied by the Jews, in 628. The failure of several missions among the Christians made him distrustful of Christians as well as Jews. Nevertheless, Islam spread through the Arab world and beyond. Muhammad died in the arms of his third wife, Aishah, on June 8, 632. (www.factmonster.com)
Joys and Sorrows Offering
Ramadan: Surrender and Control
The Ramadan practice of surrendering the physical to the spiritual started me thinking about surrender in general. I do not know how many of us would say that we have surrendered to anyone or anything, including God, however we understand that word. On the other hand, people familiar with 12 step programs know the steps begin with a recognition that we cannot manage our lives and so turn ourselves over to a Higher Power. That’s surrender. Nevertheless, with our Unitarian Universalist emphasis on independence and individual freedom of belief and conscience, surrender can present a disquieting picture. Perhaps for you it has the connotations of weakness, of dependence, of resignation, of a loss of power, a loss of control, loss in general. On the other hand, perhaps surrender connotes rest, peace, coming to acceptance of a reality one cannot change, making the most of it. One of the messages of Ramadan is that surrender can both strengthen us and in itself be an act of strength.
I look at surrender as one end of a continuum with control on the other end. How we respond at any given time to the circumstances of our lives determines our shifting place on that continuum.
In response to the situations of our lives, we move between an exertion of control and a practice of surrender. My father sold advertising for the Brooklyn Eagle, a newspaper which went out of business when the unions struck it. It was the best job of his life and he did not get over it. He never kept another job for very long after that, invariably finding the working conditions unacceptable. I remember his unhappiness and I feel sad for it. One way that we try to exert control over life is by not accepting the reality of our situations. We want the good times to last and we hold onto them tightly, and we want the bad times to go by quickly and we hold onto them hardly at all. Understandable as this is, life doesn’t always work that way. We can feel so dissatisfied with our situations that we get stuck wishing they were otherwise, as my father did. Wishing the good times had lasted. He never was able to surrender to losing the Brooklyn Eagle and move on with his life. Struggling against the reality of our situations often does not help us. We can neither accept20them nor change them when we become so caught up in the struggle. I speak from my own experience here. Surrendering to them, in the form of acceptance, can free us to find ways of accommodating, ways of making them more to our liking, ways of recreating ourselves to better fit current circumstances. We can enjoy our place in the world; we can dislike it intensely. But if we cannot or do not accept whatever that place is, we find ourselves beating our heads against the brick wall of a reality we are not really dealing with. Surrender in this case means, not helpless resignation, but active, even imaginative acceptance. Surrender as holding on, not too tight and not too loose. Surrender as letting go of too tight and too loose. Do you ever find yourself caught up in a struggle against some reality? Does the very wishing it weren’t so ever prevent you from moving forward? I know what that’s like.
In our emotional response to the situations of our lives we can also vacillate between control and surrender. While we might recognize our circumstances, we might not accept or want to feel the emotions those circumstances give rise to. So we attempt to control our feelings by suppressing them, or=2 0denying them, or ignoring them, or minimizing them, or blaming someone else. In his emotional response to his career, my father, in my perception, sought release for his feelings through anger at every boss he ever had after the Brooklyn Eagle. No one was good enough. I think he couldn’t, or didn’t, feel his grief over that loss, and consciously or not, sought to escape it through anger. In his attempt to run away from that intense loss and keep it under control, my father himself became controlled by the feelings the loss brought with it. Even as a child I sensed what a tragedy this was for him and that somehow he kept going round and round in circles.
In this case surrender means, not weakness, but the courage to look into the mirror of ourselves, recognize and name what’s really there and experience it. If we have a toothache it is not in our best interests to ignore it, nor to simply seek to control it with pain killers or antibiotics to ease the infection, or even with meditation as a response to pain. Surrendering to the toothache does not mean letting it go untreated, or helplessly subjecting ourselves to needless agony, but rather it means taking care of i t layer by layer. First the ache, then the issue in the tooth causing the discomfort. Most of us do not seek out pain. Most of us would rather avoid it. But pain, whether physical or emotional, is telling us something about ourselves and presenting us with an opportunity to pay attention to and even heal something that needs attention. Surrendering to our emotions means openness to that opportunity. It means a certain fearlessness in being with ourselves.
Thinking that we have control, that we know what to do, that we can make what we want to happen, that our views and our desires are the right ones, brings a sense of power. We feel powerful. And we need to have some sense of power in this world. Yet the power which arises out of control often proves illusory. There’s something perfectionistic attached to it. We cannot always make what we want to happen; we do not always know what to do; we do not have control over other people; we close our minds and our hearts when we think that our views and beliefs are the exclusive truth. The power that comes from a too tight control is illusion. Surrender brings a feeling of power also, power of a different kind. Surrender does not mean powerlessness. It does not mean helplessness or dependence. To accept the reality of a given circumstance, however uncomfortable, however much we did not choose it, will bring us strength. To allow ourselves to grieve a loss, or feel a pain and not cover it over is bravery. It is growth because we realize that we can do it and the next time we have to do it, we do so with even more strength. Being alive is like finding ourselves unexpectedly in deep water. We can try to impose our will upon it and flail around and tire ourselves out. Or we can remember that we know how to swim and work with the water. And if we don’t know how to swim we can turn on our backs, lie face up and let the water carry us. The letting go that surrender entails brings in its wake its own sense of control. It is the power and confidence that arise from our ability to be with whatever life sends us, work with it, learn from it. We become more open, more flexible, more willing. We see more possibilities; we find more opportunities. This is when change occurs. Surrender can be an act of strength and power and one that feeds our spirit. Can you think of a time when you surrendered, w hen you accepted, when you could be fully present in your life? What was that like?
Just about a year ago my cousin Barbara, really a sister to me, died. She called me down to Florida and died in my presence virtually as soon as I got there, leaving me the eldest in my family. As with anniversaries of this sort, I am aware it’s coming and I’m aware of the feelings of sadness and loss coming with it. I’m letting myself be with them. Recently I took out a book of old photos and saw my mother as a child, my grandmother, my parents and aunt and uncle, me as a five year old. In the paying attention to what’s going on within me I have discovered something very important, namely that I need to locate myself in my history. By that I mean I need to speak with my remaining cousin/sister, Judy, a year younger than me, and ask her to tell me what she remembers of our family, of me as a child. I intuit that it will be a knitting together for me, a way to accept this loss on a deeper level. Surrender to heal the spirit.
This Ramadan, as many of the one billion Muslims in the world fast from sunrise to sunset, they surrender the physical to the spiritual. Perhaps we will not be fasting for the next month. Nevertheless, the lesson of surrender as an act of strength, as a grower of our spirits, as a spiritual practice, is one we can gratefully receive from Islam and apply in the many arenas of our lives. May it be so.
Song #348 Guide My Feet
Closing words: by Rumi, The Guest House This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.