As Ramadan starts this week for most Muslims. To glean facts about it, sometimes one must go to the root of the tradition.
“The word Ramadan means ‘to burn.’ . “Part of the purpose is to burn away bad habits, burn away impunity. To burn away things that are distracting you from the remembrance of God.”
Ramadan is a month long spiritual gym where Muslims work on metaphysical muscles through more deliberate disciplines, prayer, reflections and worship.
It is an annual Muslim attempt to simultaneously grow vertically in their relationship with their Allah and horizontally with fellow human beings through emphatic and various acts of charity.
It is a month of self-auditing and self-evalutaion where believers check their accounts in Heavenly currency terms and all be able to bring themselves to a level where they can accept and welcome all what Ramadan can give them.
This Ramadan, Muslims strive to be as fully present as possible, experiencing their physical hunger and thirst as the soul’s yearning for divine nourishment. Muslim communities be as the flowering trees of well-tended orchards, growing in abundance the fruits of patience, kindness, compassion and love.
Muslims who participate in Ramadan are not only supporting and reinforcing each other’s spiritual state in a coherent field of resonance, they are also contributing to the global coherence of humanity by sending the energies of love, devotion, and ego-transcendence into the collective soul.
Fasting in Ramadan, because it offers an intense lived experience of the holy, saves Islam from being merely a form of belief and takes it to the level of spiritual perception, which is the sustenance of faith.
Ramadan is a celebration of the closeness of the Divine, of family and community - which makes it the perfect time to welcome the stranger into our midst.
When inviting loved ones for iftar, Muslims ask them to bring someone whom they do not know. Make room especially for those who are without family, partners, or friends during this sacred month, growing both in their hearts and their ideas of community.
In the Bible it is stated ‘Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in us’ (I Cor. 6:19), and in the Qur’an God says, ‘I breathe into him [Adam] My Spirit’ (28:72).
With these verses in mind, the spiritual practices of fasting, prayers, charity, and intense meditation during Ramadan reminds us that our body is a base for the presence of the Spirit. Experiencing the presence of the Spirit reminds us to appreciate the body as sacred as well as rediscover and reconnect the sacredness of nature.
The combination of reestablishing our link with nature’s ecology and a deeper God-consciousness (tawhid) fosters a heightened awareness of the One present in all things.
Ramadan’s sacred time re-delivers what it means to be human; it provides insight into knowledge of love, beauty, and truth while living a life of gratitude. Ramadan tells us that cultivating wisdom is beyond dogma and doctrine, rather the focus is on the Spirit.
Ramadan is a priceless opportunity to take action and become a better servant to humanity. Ramadan is a precious gem that attracts God’s nearness, His mercy, His blessings, and His forgiveness.
Ramadan is a narrow path that reminds Muslims fasting is not just about abstaining from food and drink, but also from back biting, gossiping, malice, suspicion, miserliness, extravagance, vulgarity, immodesty, infidelity, arrogance,
ignorance, cowardice, and thinking ill of others, so that when food and drink become permissible once again, the Muslims have built an internal fortress to permanently abstain from the aforementioned bad habits
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