What Remains of Us during Ramadan?
Ramadan Mubarak!--May you have a blessed Ramadan. Our annual month of fasting, intensive worship, and reading the Quran has arrived. Whether you are celebrating the month for the first time, the twentieth time, or you're simply looking into what this is all about, we pray your efforts are filled with God's blessing.
If you are new to this religion, you may hear many explanations of what exactly we are doing during this month. When I first became Muslim, I heard that fasting is a form of solidarity with the poor and hungry, that it reminds us of our blessings, or that we fast simply because God commands us to. The most confusing part of this was that none of these were wrong answers. However, none of them seemed to capture the essence of what I experienced during my fasts. So what is Ramadan all about?
Ramadan is the meeting of our authentic selves with our Lord. It is the answer to the question of what remains of us when our material existence is diminished and our spiritual hearts are allowed to shine forth. The promise of Ramadan is that we meet God in our best and most beautiful state--with an empty belly.
God says in the Quran:
يا ايها الذين أمنوا كتب عليكم الصيام كما كتب على الذين من قبلكم لعلكم تتقون
"O you who believe, fasting has been prescribed for you, just as it was prescribed for those who came before you, that you might attain God-consciousness." (2:183)
The answer to our earlier question is that we fast to attain God-consciousness. Fasting exists to wake us up. It takes us from a neglectful slumber into a state of hyper-awareness of our Lord. This may seem ironic given the sleepiness and lack of energy most of us feel especially in our first week of fasting. But in consciously saying "no" to ourselves--our appetites, our desires, our comfort--we come alive in the consciousness of our Creator. Our hearts and minds shift from a place of self-centeredness to God-centeredness. Our living and our breathing become not for ourselves but for God.
It is for this reason that our Prophet ﷺ tells us: “Every [good] deed of the son of Adam is multiplied, a single deed as ten times the like of it up to seven hundred times. Allah Almighty said, ‘Except for fasting, as it is for Me and I will reward it. They leave their desires and their food for My sake.’”
How does this work? What is the connection between fasting and God-consciousness? If we look to what we fast from--eating, drinking, and sexual activity--it becomes clear that our fasting denies a particular part of our nature, the animal-self. We give up appetite, which weakens passions like anger. These are the aspects of our souls that we share in common with animals and which tie us to the material world around us. It may come as a surprise to many of us that there is more to ourselves than this aspect of our soul! Fasting shows us what remains of ourselves when we strip that away. It opens the door to a greater reality that lives within us: that when we are not preoccupied with fulfilling our worldly needs, an awareness of our Lord who is beyond ourselves, yet closer to us than ourselves, emerges naturally and effortlessly. Ramadan brings us closer to our angelic natures.
Many of us embrace Islam around the same time we become adults and leave home. This was certainly true for me. One of the things I have noticed over the years are the parallels between what happens to the fasting soul and what happens to our relationships with our parents after we become adults. We get an answer to a similar question: what remains? What remains of our relationship with our parents when we are no longer looking to them for material support? For so long we relied upon them to feed us, clothe us, and shelter us. What remains when we begin to do this for ourselves? The answer to this question will differ for all of us. However, in the best cases, what remains is a deeper love and gratitude born of a new awareness, a consciousness, of everything our parents provided us over the years. This awareness can only arise after we begin our fast from their support. But once it is there, it transforms the relationship. Love and devotion deepens; and sometimes, in the most beautiful cases, genuine friendship emerges.
The beautiful thing about fasting is that, while the destination of God-consciousness is the same for all of us, the path each of us take to get there will differ. We all have different souls that will react differently to the fast. If this is your first time embarking on the journey, my advice is to go easy and don't go alone. Fasting will expose you to parts of yourself you may not know exist. Judge yourself gently as you would someone else you're encouraging to succeed. And find a community of Muslims to break your fast with as often as you can. The road is always easier with companions.