Ramadan, one of the greatest events in the Muslim calendar, began a couple of nights ago.  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 most people of faith, take time to 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.

     

    Either way, do use the fact of Ramadan to remind yourself that we live this life as a gift, that we spend our days in the aegis of a personal transcendence.  We live in the umbra of a beautiful (and often exasperating) wave of experience, balancing what we see and what we cannot.  Ramadan tells us that we are not alone. It says to us that we live in a vision, an intensely personal vision in which all things find purpose and meaning, the full truth of what is.

    There's much more to believe than what we see.

     Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that, whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we are ultimately no more than dust.  When we die and pass out of this life, what remains of us will soon be no more, too, subsumed in the earth from which it has come.  A number of years ago, when my wife and I were in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, I took an afternoon to hike to a meadow where, one year before, one of my dearest cousin's ashes had been scattered.  Tragically, she had died of mesothelioma at the age of 58.  Long did I stand before the meadow, catching the wind, soaking in the vista, thinking about her.  All Liz's years, all her love, all her joy, all her meaning, all her hopes and dreams now strewn among the flowers and rivers she loved so dearly.  Joyful, but deeply sobering.

    Even more sobering is that one day, every one of us will be exactly the same.  We are so fragile, so frightfully fragile.  What meaning have we?  What is our point?  As we contemplate our mortality, we see ever more clearly how thin the line is between life and death, sentience and dust, fire and ashes.  We are so contingent, so tenuous:  how can we ever hope to be?

     Yet Ash Wednesday also reminds us that we are not dust and ashes only, that life is not total absurdity.  It tells us that we are physical creatures, yes, but spiritual creatures, too.  We are created beings.  We are meaningful, we are significant.  We are loved.

    Death is not the end.