I’m scared to admit it – which, by my internal code of ethics, means that I must do so, immediately – but I’m fasting.

I’m worried that my Fat Acceptance friends will frown and sigh. I promise, it has nothing to do with weight loss, promoting disordered eating, or body hatred.

No, it is way worse than that. Last week I blog-slapped Liz Jones for her sojourn into burqa tourism, but now I’m travelling that same path. Indeed, my darlings, I’m roadtripping on a little highway called called ‘cultural appropriation’ and also doing a little off-roading through the territory of the religious voyeur. I’m fasting for Ramadan.

I’m not a Muslim. I suppose, nominally, I’m a Christian although no pew has charmed my backside since a seat-warming at a gothic Catholic Church in Melbourne, Australia on Christmas Eve 1998. And that probably doesn’t count as authentic worship as I’m pretty sure I was wearing glitter makeup. For some reason I recall wearing a headband with antenna but I might be conflating memories. I sure hope so. In any case, you get the drift. I was not sober and I’m a craptastic Christian.

[Before a few Catholics flame me for being disrespectful, I was not obviously drunk, unless I was indeed wearing a headband with deely-boppers, in which case I was obviously, flagantly, publicly inebriated, for which I'm sorry, but I was out of my mind with romantic angst so I plead extenuating circumstances. Here is what happened: at the request and on the dime of my first love, with whom I had recently split, I flew to Australia so we could get back to loving each other forever and ever. When I got arrived, he had a girlfriend. Cue crying, anguishing over our imaginary unborn children, drinking, aloneness in a horrific hotel, the need to wear glitter makeup and possibly other bizarre accessories, and ending up in a Catholic church on Christmas Eve. Jesus loves lost sheep.]

[Sidenote: On Friday, a coworker outlined her criteria for new friends. It is simple stuff: 'unless you've been abandoned by a man in a foreign country at least once, we can't have drinks.' She and I can totally go out.]

Back to me and my non-Muslimah self and Ramadan. Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam, during which Muslims fast from dawn to dusk for one month. The idea (so far as I can tell and don’t take my word for it, seriously) is that fasting strengthens your personal discipline and patience, helps you to understand the experience of people around the world who are genuinely suffering from hunger, and that the experience of fasting promotes spiritual enlightenment and clarity.

My personal self discipline and patience – well, I hesitate to even name these virtues as ‘mine’. I’m primarily fueled by passion. The two pillars of my own life are my writing and my children and I can tell you it takes zero self-discipline to do my job with either. Patience, yes. I have a bit of that, now, but it is a new and weak muscle. I blame my children for my newfound patience and I admit that I apply it to pretty much nothing in my life except my children.

I’m all about passion. I lack patience. I’m newly single. You can see why I call this year thirty-sex. It is juicy. There is some serious learning and growing and aspiring going on. This year seems to me to be all about sex, and, more recently, spirituality (but I don’t have a clever pun for the latter). A couple of months ago, someone said to me that, based on my blog, he thought I was a ’spiritual’ person. I checked to make sure he had the correct URL. Indeed he did and I was stunned. I have never thought of myself as spiritual. I don’t talk about God. I don’t talk about divinity and angels and I don’t even know more spiritual concepts to flesh out the floundering list, that’s how not spiritual I am.

And then, after this one person told me I’m spiritual, several people echoed it. Others have told me that my words have power; and most recently, someone told me I was a good shepherd. That compliment landed in my heart and then grew wings and soared. The spiritual allusions of that language of is so compelling – it was both humbling and an honour to be described in that way.

So I surrendered. I looked up “spiritual” on Wikipedia.

Spiritual matters regard humankind’s ultimate nature and purpose, not as material biological organism, but as spirits or energy with an eternal relationship beyond the bodily senses, time and the material world. The spiritual is contrasted with the physical and the temporary. A sense of connection is central of spirituality — connection to a reality beyond than the physical world and oneself, which may include an emotional experience of awe and reverence.

Oh, okay. I see. That is totally the kind of stuff I think about. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from my obsessions with Russell Simmons’ white girlfriend, fat asses (yours and mine), and dating, but yes, I am worried about the meaning of life and how best to be living it. So maybe I should start thinking about this stuff a little more explicitly and that might mean looking in to how other people, including philosophers and prophets and poets, have explored these issues. I’ve started learning about different faiths and traditions and approaches to the divine. Fasting is one of those approaches.

Once more, something is in the air (or at least on Twitter) because I’m not the only non-Muslim fasting for Ramadan. I’ve been talking to non-Muslims in Canada and the US who are fasting with their Muslim brothers and sisters for reflection, patience, and discipline.

[Have I mentioned in this blog how much I love Twitter and how it seems to be such a wiseinspiringlovespace?]

Still, because I’m all a-worried about being a religious voyeur, and because really it is a private matter between me and my God (hence the blog post hahahahaha), I’ve been too shy to tell my real-life Muslim friends (but consider this blog a shout-out). I told some of my non-Muslim friends who looked at me, aghast, and I’m fairly certain that there is a fairly profitable pool predicting which day I’ll falter. This is entirely reasonable. I get irritable if I even think that I might be hungry, soon. In my life, this is such an established and well-known fact that if I am being bitchy, people in my life have been known to address the hunger rather than the bitchiness. Me: You bastard, you’ve been cheating on me! Him: Baby, have you eaten? Would you like a cracker? Crisis averted. It is really that simple. Fasting is not my first language or even my third.

The practice of fasting for spiritual enlightenment is not unique to Islam, and I think that there is something to it. I don’t buy the current secular craze for ‘cleansing’ because I think that is based on the science of woo, which is to say it is not scientific at all my darlings, but I do believe that there are psychological and physiological effects to not eating for periods of
time. One of them is that you are hungry. Just sayin’.

But seriously. I’m two days into fasting and I’m feeling fragile and emotionally thin-skinned and I don’t have the energy to bullshit myself. This feeling reminds me of when I am sick and it turns me into a love bug: I crave hugs and kisses and closeness and connection, even more than usual, which is a lot. It suddenly occurred to me that feeling unaccustomedly tired or fragile is a gift: in these moments you don’t have the strength to ignore your truths.

So. I had a spiritual epiphany on Day 2. Does that mean I’m done and can return to carrot muffins in daylight hours? Because although that juicy bit of wisdom feels wonderful, I’m afraid that I may not have the discipline for this. Four weeks of this is a lot of hungry days. Muslims who fast are tough cookies. Please give them cookies, but only after dark, because that’s just respect, people.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 4:32 am and is filed under Meaning, Purpose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.