Ramadan and the Feast: when time cannot be made cash

Another Ramadan has come and gone from our lives, from our allotted years. Every year, when its time arrives, it settles into the middle of our fragmented, scattered lives. In an instant it brings together and unites those scattered lives, perceptions and experiences. Everyone surely receives it in their own way, from wherever they stand, but everyone puts themselves in order when it arrives.

No one can ignore it, no one can behave as if it did not exist. Even those who are not glad of its coming feel its presence in one way or another. It stands there somewhere as a concrete intervention from the divine realm into this world. It reflects upon the poor and the destitute as mercy and abundance.

Under its spiritual climate, people feel to their very marrow that they are not alone, that what they live through is not peculiar to them. Ramadan is an experience in which a person builds bridges to God, to other people, to the adherents of other religions, to the past and to the future, and thereby feels that he has risen above time. At the same moment, the same experience is being lived in every corner of the world; its name is fasting.

Moreover, this experience, lived in every corner of the world, has been lived since the most ancient times, since the first human being. Even more, it will continue to be lived until the last human being. This feeling, which leads a person to feel himself an atom of a great being stretching from the ancient past to the future, envelops him in a consciousness of tawhid in which only God remains. However much a person may resist, this consciousness is engraved in the depths of his soul as a symbol of faith, and from there it somehow affects life and behavior.

That is why the symbols of faith must not be neglected; yet even if people neglect them, God has already placed them in the human world in a way that cannot be uprooted. Here is the prayer, here is the Hajj, here is the sacrifice, here is the call to prayer, here is the headscarf...

Each of these symbols stands somewhere out there. Whether we take part in them or not, they continue to carry out their rulings. They have, as it were, an existence of their own. Almighty God continues to protect His religion with these symbols as a door of mercy and compassion for people. When we take part in them, we find in them our own enthusiasm and our own joy, which are continually present there. We come to life through them. Do we contribute anything to them? Surely we do, but ours is nothing to be flung in anyone's face. On the contrary, it is God who is grateful to us for keeping these doors continually open to us.

And so, when Ramadan arrives, no one is in a position to tell it not to come. It comes and settles into the middle of our lives. Everyone has, and has had, a share of Ramadan. Even those who are heedless of it feel it somehow; even those who adopt a stubborn indifference toward it cannot escape becoming aware of it. At the very least, through its aspect of determining all time and the calendar and affecting daily life, it keeps reminding you that it is there, that it concerns you, that it is vitally concerned with you and your existence.

And then it goes...

It goes having reminded us once more, having taught us, that God is there, that He is the Lord not of some of us but of all of us and of all the worlds, that He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, that He is more merciful to us than we are to ourselves. But it goes in order to return. Whichever of us has a life long enough next year will welcome it anew. May God grant us to prepare to welcome it better.

Ramadan will return. That is why, as a gift of beginning again after it, it leaves a festival. The festival is the feast of beginning anew. Of returning to the start, but changed, having covered some distance, in one's life or in one's gains...

Life is an experience that moves forward. In truth, no one can return to the beginning completely. When everyone returns to the same point, they return with many things in their life changed and with a heavier load. A year later, when a person experiences Ramadan again and then its festival, he finds the opportunity to measure how far he has come and from where. Each year, at the festivals, people close the gap that has opened between their own lives and the lives of others. Whoever we are, and whatever our work, profession, age or sex, we return to the place where all humanity meets and gather there.

I remember having written this before. There is no room for relativism at the festival. Everyone may have different experiences and different worlds of meaning, but at the festival no one needs a debate about his own role. Everyone takes part in a play whose meaning and script were written and staged long ago by someone else. "Everything falls into its place at the festival. The balances and relations of life are restored. I am not sure of the semantic relationship between iade (restoration, return) and iyd (festival), but their phonetic closeness is no coincidence, and moreover it is entirely in keeping with the nature of things that this restoration is accompanied by exuberance and joy."

That is why the festival is a restoration. The restoration of the point where we began, of what we have lost, of our authenticity, our sincerity, our genuineness, our purest state.

Moreover, even in an age when time, like everything else, is seen entirely as a possession (a commodity, cash), Ramadan comes and goes every year to remind us, to teach us, that neither property nor time is within our own dominion.

The existence of festivals is a mercy and an abundance, pointing the way to human beings, who are always inclined to lose their way, and flowing out into existence. May this mercy and abundance never be lacking upon you.

May your Ramadan Festival be blessed.