The Hardest Pilgrimage is Home
Samye, the oldest Tibetan Buddhist monastery, closed its doors on April 14th to outside visitors. Despite governmental proclamations of safety, there were underground circulations that this was necessary. The Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo still broadcasts the daily prayers throughout the neighborhood, but the only feet inside the temple are those of the muezzin. And in Italy’s Duomo di Milano cathedral, opera singer Andrea Bocelli sang a broadcast concert, a ray of hope to an empty hall of worship. Our world is unoccupied, fasting from contact. The places we pray are unoccupied. But perhaps this helps us remember the spirit that brought us there in the first place takes up far more room than we thought. Isn’t the all-powerful all-powerful?
When I was a teenager, one my favorite songs was “Empty” by the Cranberries. I always felt like there was a blank line somewhere on my soul that I didn’t know how to fill. It’s a unique characteristic of adolescence that seems to have followed me: searching for something to answer life’s deepest questions, to warm my heart and make me feel whole. As if I weren’t whole already. The melancholy of this song, and more so, the melody kept me listening to it on repeat. That’s what we did in the 90s, listened to an album until the CD skipped.
But these days the emptiness I see is different. City sidewalks where pedestrians walked like pinballs are deserted. Bustling airports, idle. Once congested highways, vacuous. An emptiness of sound has replaced the cacophony of human voices that accompany the erratic nature of shared living. There is something eerie about our greatest gathering places, devoid of life.
But life is still happening, in a new way. We have to ask ourselves what it means to be alive. We have to ask what it means to be whole and complete, what it means to be connected. There is a spiritual invitation here. A bodily ask. As we approach the two month mark of quarantine, we are leaping from one holy season of fasting to another. Easter marked the end of Lent and Ramadan begins this week.
Lent is a Christian observance that lasts 40 days, beginning on Ash Wednesday. Christians are asked to honor Jesus’ trek into the desert by fasting or sacrificing something significant. It’s up to each person what they may give up. In addition to synching with the feast days of Ishtar, and the Pagan holiday of Ostara, Easter is known as the time when Christ rose from the dead. This is the rebirth of Jesus’ returning to civilization after his time in the desert, and his return to living after his crucifixion. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been thinking about rebirth a lot lately. Easter arrives to ease the effort, and that’s when the fasting ends. You can reach for your potato chips, turn on Netflix, or sleep in past 8am.
Ramadan begins after the sighting of the first moon in the ninth month in the Islamic calendar. In the west that’s April 22nd. These 30 days invoke spiritual growth and self-improvement. During Ramadan, the angel Gabriel revealed the word of God, which later became the Koran, to the prophet Mohammed. The Koran gives clear instructions to fast from sunup to sundown from the first sighting of the moon. This means refraining from food, water, violence, sex, smoking and all forms of sin. The effort required to do this builds resilience and devotion to God. I don’t know if I could do it. Intermittent ketogenic fasting is hard enough. Perhaps because the fast is so strict, there is a rich sense of community fostered throughout. For practicing Muslims, the celebration is not just the end of the month, it’s also the end of each day.
Because the west follows the Gregorian calendar, and the Islamic calendar is Lunar, these holidays, holy days, do not always occur this close to one another. But this year they do. And it’s worth noting. When we hold off on what we love, we remember our source. Both holidays invite reverence to god through emptying out what is impure. There is a symbiotic relationship between aspects of life. For everything you give up, you gain. We forget what we are capable of when we go it alone. But oddly, we are more unified than we have ever been. There is no person who is not affected by this global shutdown.
You were never asked if you wanted to fast. You were never told that emptying your life of all that made it normal would be helpful. It might not. But it also might. In a world so tangled in bureaucracy and misinformation, I have struggled to believe that we could make changes needed to radically improve life for the greater good of all people. The hardest pilgrimage, it turns out, , is the one that leads us nowhere new. To wake up, go nowhere, go to sleep, and repeat is as much a fast as refraining from violence mid-day. Stay the course my friends. This is your soul molting. We are in this together now, let’s stay together when we rebuilt.