Ramadan

It has been a couple weeks since I went to the Ramadan meal hosted by the Minneapolis Council of Churches.  I've been mulling over in my head what I would write, sitting down a couple of different times with ideas in mind, only to get distracted or annoyed with whatever cloying phrase I'd stumbled over. This was simply a blog post that wanted to be written but I didn't quite have the smarts to set it down.

Which means this attempt may be written and rewritten a dozen times before I finally leave it alone for blog posterity.  But today, I will at least get the ball rolling.

The MN Council of Churches supports a dozen or so meals at area mosques during Ramadan.  It's a chance for non-Muslims to break bread with their Muslim neighbors during the holiest month of the Muslim year.  And as the vast majority of non-Muslims will never set foot inside a mosque, it's a chance to actively view their neighbors in prayer, in fasting, and in worship.  Simple things, really, but it's amazing the shapes that form in one's head when ignorance proliferates.  The inside of a mosque is painted not by reality, but by movies and daydreams, two mediums not known for their veracity.

I'm a Christian who has lived in a Muslim country.  I was loved and cared for by Muslims in Morocco.  They fed me, they made me drink nasty drinks when my tummy ached (verbena goat milk, anybody?), they laughed with me (and at me, I know, given how often I butchered Arabic), and they cried when I left. So, to me, disparate religions notwithstanding, the differences I note between us are not substantive.  If you live amongst a foreign population, you quickly take stock of what differs and what doesn't and I think in most instances, the latter outweighs the former. Love is the same. Family tensions are the same. Dreams are the same. And being hungry in Morocco feels the same as being hungry in Minnesota.

But I think sometimes that that experience in Morocco has saddened me a bit.  It has saddened me because I feel surrounded sometimes by people and media within my home country that seem desperate to cling to ignorance and hatred despite the best evidence of its opposite.  It is much easier, safer even, to hate and distrust what differs from one's self.  It's the natural tendency and we so often fail to fight it.  But that tendency disgusts and angers me, and so I find myself having saddened, perpetually lowered expectations of how mainstream America will treat Muslim citizens.

I believe in the Biblical God, believe in salvation through Jesus Christ, and I do not believe that my faith in Christ is supposed to alienate me from my Muslim brothers and sisters.  There is nothing in the Bible that calls us to be divisive.  There is nothing in the Bible that calls for us to segregate ourselves from non-believers and leave said non-believers to their own devices.  The Great Commission states the EXACT opposite.  It tells us to go out into the world and love one another with a love reminiscent of God's love for us.  Alienation, hatred, and divisiveness, though encouraged often in the media and political context, is not Biblical.

But I sometimes feel within certain pockets of my religion (I was raised Southern Baptist but would probably refer to myself, if prodded, as an evangelical non-denominational Christian), that alienation and distance from "those unlike ourselves" is somewhat encouraged. Or, at least, that the blurring of lines between certain pockets of my religion and political leanings, has caused me to attach such calls for divisiveness to the religion of my childhood as well as certain political groups. And this saddens me. Because there is a lot of goodness in the church I was raised in, and I hate to feel it clouded by an aura of mistrust and isolationism.

In the basement of the mosque in Northeast Minneapolis, there sat a crowd of about 40 non-Muslims, waiting to break the fast.  Before hearing an explanation of Ramadan, we went around the room introducing ourselves and most of those in attendance stated the congregation they belonged to. By the end of those 40 I was happily, rightfully astonished, and disabused of my somewhat cynical expectation that Christians (of which I realize I am one) would largely ignore any opportunity to engage this foreign religion.  I was the only Baptist that I noted, but there were several Methodists, several Church of Christ, one Quaker, a handful of priests, several members of different Catholic parishes, a few pastors of area congregations, a couple Orthodox Christians, many Lutherans, , a few non-denominationals, and a rabbi.

I believe God's heart aches for all that do not know him.  And my religion is one that calls on us to recognize God's ache within our own chests and use that to propel us into the world, in constant relationship with those who need to know God and his son. And if I believe in that ache, I must believe that to be divided or somehow alienated from those God calls on me to love is not only a tragedy but a sin. But even outside the evangelical perspective (and my "evangelical" is relational more than anything else), to be a Christian also calls on us to love (not "put up with" or "ignore") our neighbor.  And "neighbor," to me, is inclusive of every human being on the planet.  So to be surrounded by so many Christians with the same desire, to love the way that Christ loves, by engaging with neighbors in their home and on their turf, was a beautiful, encouraging thing.

The pastor at my church this past Sunday made a comment after we took the Lord's Supper.  He asked us who we had broken bread with recently.  Who had we sat down and communed with, the way God calls us? Who, of God's children, had we sat next to in the last week and simply given time to? I should be able to answer that question every week, and not just this once.