Our Cousins In Faith
a prayer for Ramadan
Thank you for joining us!
It’s been a while since I did something a little different, so I thought I would share a resource from last year’s April ebook.
Yesterday began the season of Ramadan for our Muslim faith-siblings around the world. I didn’t know much about Ramadan until I had the great honor of teaching alongside a wonderful Muslim woman when I worked in a special needs classroom for a handful of years.
To this day, she was one of the most fascinating people I have ever discussed faith with. We spent many a lunch hour talking about theology, and she patiently answered my questions about Islam and its many facets. We parsed out the differences in our beliefs, yes, but most of all I was struck by how similar our faiths could be. From her, I learned what devotion to God can truly look like. It was one of the most inspiring relationships I’ve ever had.
I believe that we can learn a lot from faith traditions that are not our own. When we turn inward and ignore other faiths, we run the risk of letting fear and discomfort lead us instead of curiosity and kindness. The more we communicate, the more similarities we find. We find ourselves to be long-lost spiritual cousins, not strangers at all.
Curiosity is, to my mind, the unsung virtue. It gives us bigger hearts, sharper minds, and a willingness to be stretched. It builds spiritual muscle, and it brings us closer to the heart and character of God. Without curiosity to bring fresh water into our lives we remain stagnant, disinterested, and ultimately stuck.
There is no value in walling ourselves in.
Ramadan is truly fascinating, and the use of fasting as a tool for prayer is an ancient one. Inspired by my time teaching alongside my Muslim friend, I penned the following poem last year as a Celtic-inspired prayer for Christians who want to bless our Muslim friends during this time.
Note: this poem is part of our newly-released Spring Poetry Collection, which includes all of last year’s seasonal-spring poetry in an abridged ebook!
A Celtic Prayer For Ramadan
O God of Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael: walk with these, our cousins in faith, in this holy, hungry time, as we bear witness to their fasting, may we see the places where we might mindfully go without as we see them celebrate, may we be reminded of all that we should be grateful for. teach us to ask wise questions teach us to reach out in love where there is fear, strike it to the root; for fear has no place in the family of faith. sow only peace, and holy curiosity and a sacred sense that You have spoken in and through our cousins in faith in ways that only we can hear.
Blessings on you this Ramadan season!
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I struggle with copying things from keep notes and using the clipboard function so this might be the second or even third attempt. I know that one was a copy of a text to a friend about some payments that I have been making for his storage. I also struggle with finding my way back to a comment that I want to edit and in this case delete so I apologize if you get something weird
In the early 1990s I was a graduate teaching assistant in speech communication. I had one section that included quite a few Muslim Students from Malaysia. They were funded by the Malaysian government and were there with the intention of teaching English as a second language when they returned home after graduation.
The World Trade Center had been bombed in the parking garage not long before that and I asked some of them what they thought of that. They thought it was terrible and contrary to their spiritual beliefs. The Ku Klux Klan does not represent Christianity and terrorists do not represent Islam.
Two of my students were married. One weekend I took them back home with me to my very small town and church on Sunday,
It hadn't been that long since a Lutheran marrying a Catholic and vice versa was scandalous, so I might have been pushing the envelope, but it really didn't occur to me at the time.
In 2016 my daughter was in intensive care for 13 days and then moved to the infection Ward for another 12. One of her doctors was a Muslim from Pakistan and I shared with that doctor my daughter's concern that because she was there on the lower paying Medicaid they might discharge her early.
The doctor's response was a heartfelt " that wouldn't be fair!"
This reply is leading to a lot of other thoughts and I am recording this in Google Keep notes which I will then paste into my reply to your post on our cousins, so I am going to stop here and use this as an intro to a post on spirituality in Merlin's newsletter
When I was still working in the office, I worked with three muslim women. One from Afghanistan, one from Pakistan, and one from Sudan. Interestingly, these were the only three I could speak to unrestrained about faith. I don't know what it is about Islam that makes faith in God such an active and dare I say obvious part of life. Most of the Christian world is very sectarian and team-loyal--and in todays culture it is better to assume someone is atheist than to assume they are Christian.
There's good reasons for some kinds of sectarianism--I think people ought to be Catholic, and my muslim colleagues thought I would make a good muslim--but there's kinds of sectarianism that is like loving your team more than you love the sport. Faith in God of any kind is good. When you get more detailed from that, it's easy to rub people the wrong way. This is what makes talking about faith hard--we are very conscious of our differences and it takes more intentional effort to focus on our sameness.
Anyway, all this to say that it was a breath of fresh air to be able to speak about faith without reservation to my muslim colleagues. I learned a lot about Islam and the strength of their devotion from them. We have more in common than we realize.
PS- Islam has a special devotion to the angel Gabriel because they believe it was Gabriel who delivered the Quran to Mohammed. As Christians, we can pray for our Muslim cousins through the intercession of the Angel Gabriel, guardian angel of Muslims!