Ramadan.  For the Muslim, it is a word that stirs up great joy and anticipation; for others, indifference, confusion, even revulsion.  Ramadan is one of the greatest events in the Muslim calendar.  Thirty days of fasting, culminating in the feast of Eid al Fitr, Ramadan is a time for every Muslim to take time to celebrate and reflect on his or her relationship with Allah and the world.  It's a season of hope, wonder, mourning, and contemplation, a slice of the year in which Muslims, like any people of faith, focus more intensely on why they live as they do.
     You may not agree with the tenets of Islam; you may not like the beliefs most Muslims hold; you may be uncomfortable with Islam in general; you may even be frightened of Islam.  Nonetheless, we all must respect and admire the Muslim who pursues Ramadan in a devout way.  For thirty days, he or she eats and drinks nothing from sunrise to sunset. Nothing.  I often wonder how many of us could do the same.  Though I have fasted for as long as five days, I always drank liquids.  Never did I do without water, even for a twelve hour period.  Consider as well the football player who celebrates Ramadan.  Practicing in the hottest time of the year, he forswears all liquid throughout what is often a grueling day.  Could any of us do that?  It would be very challenging.
     Broadly speaking, Ramadan is roughly akin to the Christian period of Lent and the Jewish Day of Atonement.  It reminds us that we live this life as a gift, that we spend our days in the aegis of a God of sovereign love, a God who has sacrificed, immensely, for us, a God who longs for communion with his human creation.  We live in the umbra of a beautiful (and often exasperating) wave of experience balancing what we see and what we cannot.  Ramadan helps us ponder whether we live for ourselves and our brethren only, or for the one in whom every human finds his or her life and being, the God in whose inscrutable vision all meaning is summed, the God by whom we find true forgiveness and genuinely abundant life?
     In this season of Ramadan 2016, pray for the Muslim.  Indeed, pray for all humanity. Pray that all people will find the full truth of God.