Thank you for joining me during this very holy time for both Muslims and Christians.
We have been given a gift of celestial and spiritual alignment, as the first day of fasting for the holy month of Ramadan and Ash Wednesday, signifying the beginning of Lent, will occur on the same day this year, February 18, 2026 CE / 1447 AH. We are blessed by this rare convergence, that calls upon us to pray, fast, and care for each other… together, as one community.
Within this beautiful alignment, we celebrate all the ways we are kin, Ahl al-kitab, as People of the Book, as we pray and fast within our different disciplines of honoring the dignity of all people and of all life. As Christians and Muslims during this holy time, we celebrate what our faiths and sacred scripture share in common:
We believe in the Sustainer of the World, the Eternal, and we surrender to the grace of God, the Forever Merciful, willingly. We believe that Love is greater than death and that death never has the last word. We hope against hope, not as a stance of optimism, but as trust in Divine Providence. We believe in repentance, metanoia in the Greek, tauba in the Arabic, a turning of the heart toward the joy we find in the Beloved.
We rely on the wisdom of our prophets and in the accountability at the Last Hour.We believe in the advice Wendell Berry gives in his poem, “Manifesto,” by trusting in things that often don’t compute:
Love someone who does not deserve it…. Ask questions that have no answers…Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns… Hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come…be like the fox who makes more tracks then necessary, some in the wrong direction.
And then Berry ends his poem with his best advice: “Practice resurrection.” As Christians and Muslims, we believe that in the Divine we have eternal life and that we can rise from all matters of death and intentionally practice living in the mystery of this gift.
It is Ash Wednesday and the first day of fasting for Ramadan. We begin in prayer: “Lord, you have created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”
Often during Lent, before dawn, I pray. The days are lengthening, and I fast. I turn to one of my daily journals where I have preserved some of my high school students’ responses to reading Chapters (Surahs) from the Qur’an. After 9/11, as an Episcopal priest and teacher of religion at a boarding school, my students and I studied as many Qur’anic verses as we could, as a way to understand a people and a Revelation we knew so little about.
One student studied Surah Al-Fajr 89 and responded to its opening verse, “Consider the Daybreak,” with this scene:
Daybreak. The reddened sky fills with a silent restlessness, and eagerness to begin.The morning air tinges with anticipation as a dormant world starts to awaken in a slow, prayer-like process. All is quiet, and then you see it. After the long and arduous night, the golden flame splits the horizon, ushering in hope. Earth and everything on it is reborn. Consider again the night, the loneliness and despair of the darkness; the cold hopelessness of a world without light. “Consider the Daybreak” … and all that it brings.
I read his opening paragraph as a prayer. I put down my journal and enter into a quiet space which allows me to remember. Within the Muslim practice of dhikr, one repeats different names for the Origin of All, “whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.”
I read Rumi.
Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like somebody suddenly born into color. Do it now. You’re covered with thick cloud. Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now.
Ramadan and Lent, prayerful times of repentance, are turnings, not only away from sin, but toward a new awareness, in believing in the inner recognition of all that is True. “By Grace, God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.” Even though many have been deaf to God’s call to serve and to commit to the faith within us, we pray for the Lord to restore us.
Ash Wednesday. I am remembering my first Ash Wednesday as Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I greeted my parishioners as they came to church on the first day of Lent to make a right beginning, to be reconciled and restored by the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel. I imagine them walking to the altar rail, kneeling, and as their priest, I place on their foreheads, the ash-smudged signs of the cross. I say to each person, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I move from parishioner to parishioner; the Psalmist chants, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51).
It’s Lent. It’s Ramadan. We are fasting.
I am reminded of one of my student’s responses to the first revelation, Surah Al-Alaq 96:1-5 as she recognized that even though we are like dust, God always believes in our capacity to confront our petty selves and to live into our deeper selves:
We are made from a germ-cell, a drop of blood, which is a strong reminder – you did not create yourself. Something we often forget. We have to remember – it’s not just about what God has done for us; it’s also about what God does continuously. Ongoing creation sustains us independently from our thoughts and our work. The first revelation of the Qur’an, the Recitation, comes as a reminder, never wanting us to forget that we exist through the love of God. When we forget this, we wean ourselves from God’s assistance, falsely thinking we do not need it. Then, we make ourselves our own god.
Die to your false self before you die.
There is also another message we embrace during this holy time: “You are my beloved. For you, I have created the world.” A reminder: God knows every hair on your head; you were knitted in the womb; you were created in God’s mind as the world exploded into existence. The stardust of creation surges through your Original Blessing, Fitra, which endows you with the capacity to know the Good.
Ramadan and Lent are our shared portal into this mystery by blessing us with the time to pay attention to our intention to pray and fast and commit to our surrender into God’s care. During this time of reflection, by necessity, we need to slow down and listen to our lives.
In the opening chapter of Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth in six days and on the seventh day, God rested. Through my prayer life, I see this last day of creation, not just with God resting and inviting us to contemplation, but also as God creating rest. The first thing blessed in this new world was neither creation nor creatures, but rather the Sustainer of All blessed Time.
And like a miracle, within the mystery of life, God will speak to us through what happens to us moment by moment as holy. In our moments, we experience faith by giving things away, forgiving betrayals, and witnessing the light of the full moon.
Faith is with parents who place their newly paralyzed child on the bed and massage the soon to be atrophied muscles. Faith is with us in holding the hand of a dying parent and waiting, keeping vigil, wanting the end and despising the end.
Faith is presence, when we hurt to our bones because of our careful listening to another’s story and when we are not afraid of silence. Faith is in asking the next question and loving the details. Faith is trusting in the necessary other. Faith is expecting the beauty of the unseen harmony and in knowing there is something greater than the sum of our parts.
I turn to another volume of my daily journals and read insights from a student who studied Surah Al-Maa’idah, 5:8. She discovered in her research the legend of Christian monks in Ethiopia hearing the Qur’an recited for the first time, circa 613 CE. Companions of Prophet Muhammad were seeking asylum from persecution, and as a way to show that they worshipped the same and only God as Christians did, they recited Qur’anic verses announcing the holy birth of Jesus. The monks’ response was to cry. My student concluded her paper, which described God as Truth, with these words:
Tears.
This is what the monks understood as they started weeping: God is Truth. The Truth is everywhere but nowhere because God is the order of the cosmos, present in every little atom, every little scrap of life, but confined by none of it.The monks understood how the false gods of power and greed and fear and pettiness tempt us every day, just silly things that get in the way, but we glorify and deify them anyway and miss out on the truth. But the monks didn’t. Their life of prayer prepared them. That’s what they got right, and that’s what most religious people have tried to get right from the very first act of Abraham’s submission.
Be open. Be ready to hear the Word of God. Read, listen, and weep, willing to draw close to God, to draw close to everyone. Receive the Truth, which is everywhere and nowhere, open and shut, night and day, the piercing knock at your door, between your hands, and beyond the stars. The invitation is yours, not as a burden but as a gift.
Take it. Amen.
