As Muslims around the world draw their thirty day celebration of Ramadan to a close with the festival of Eid this week, those of us who are not Muslims, regardless of how we feel about Muslims or the Islamic religion, can, if we hold to any kind of spiritual commitment, be thankful that over a billion people across the planet have, for the last thirty days, taken concentrated time out from their often busy lives to focus on their spiritual heart and condition.  Not many of us, I dare say, are willing to go without food or drink for a few hours, let alone from dawn to sunset for thirty days in succession.  And very few of us intentionally take time for extended--more than ten or fifteen minutes--spiritual meditation or retreat.
     Sure, most of us have issues with the bases of others' spiritual commitments.  Most of us wonder, at various points, why other people pursue the spirituality they do.  Very few of us can fully agree with the foundations or parameters of every type of spiritual pursuit.  Nor should we:  if we cannot be reasonably firm and certain, against other thinking, of our own spiritual commitments, then perhaps we need to reconsider why we adhere to them. 
     Nonetheless, as the world continues on its merry way, frolicking through its sundry religious and philosophical gyrations, we can be grateful for the presence of the spiritual, however we define it, in the human experience.  We can be grateful that we and the world are such that we can ponder the larger forces beyond us, the presence that made us, the eternal intelligence and love that sustains us.  We can be grateful there is a God who has endowed the cosmos with purpose greater than itself and that we, in our spirits, can engage and enjoy it.  We can be thankful that we are more than chemicals and neurons.
     Hence, however we feel about Ramadan or those who remember it, we can be thankful that it exists.  Despite it all, God is still at work.  And only he, he who has made himself definitively known in Jesus, knows how it will all end.