March 2, 2025.
Dear Friends,
We will gather together remotely for our Badaliya and Peace Islands Institute faith sharing on Sunday, March 2. 2025 from 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm. Please join us on Zoom, or in spirit, as we encourage Inter-faith relations and pray together for the success of the fragile ceasefire agreements in Gaza and Lebanon, and an end to the on-going Israeli incursions by the IDF and settlers in the West Bank. We wait with hope for a peaceful transition to democracy in Syria as they negotiate with the diverse factions throughout the country after a long civil war. As violence continuous in far too many areas of the world may there finally be an end to war as a solution to conflict in the Ukraine, Haiti and the Sudan. Our prayers are on-going for all the victims of human-created violence as well as the increase of natural disasters due to climate change all over the world, including the devastating fires in Los Angeles. Let us continue to pray for the many humanitarian groups risking their own lives to offer much-needed aid. In addition let us remember to join our prayers to those of so many around the world who are praying for a full recovery from pneumonia for Pope Francis. The world needs his continued moral leadership and voice for an end to war and violence. May we be blessed to have him with us for some years to come.
As Christians are about to enter into the season of Lent on March 5th, the day we call Ash Wednesday, our Muslim friends began their month of Ramadan prayer and fasting on Friday, February 28th.
The origins of the 40 day Lenten practice in Christianity is thought to go back to the 2nd century and likely reflects ancient pagan practices connected to the Anglo-Saxon word, Lent, referring to the lengthening of days as we approach the coming of Spring time. The natural human response to forces in nature and earthy symbols are very much a part of our Christian heritage, from images of the "desert" as an empty place of physical and internal retreat and encounter with the Divine to the "fruit of the vine" or the "grain of wheat" that sustains life in the transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ in the ritual we call Communion.
The forty days of fasting and prayer were originally connected to those who were converting to Christianity as a time for repentance and reflection before being baptized into Christ at the celebration of Easter that was likely established just before the Council of Nicea in 325CE. However there are writings from much earlier in the church history that indicate that some form of Lent was practiced as early or even before the 2nd century. It was not until Pope Gregory I, who was the Pope between 590 and 604CE that the 40 days of Lent were practiced by all the churches worldwide. The significance of the 40 days is associated to the scriptural account of Jesus' forty days and forty nights in the desert and the temptations he resisted in preparation for his public ministry.
Recognizing that our faith tradition is grounded in the identity of Jesus as a practicing Jew who was steeped in the Hebrew Biblical tradition, we can also remember the significance of the number 40 in biblical numerology as it represents change, renewal, transformation and something new. Moses spent 40 days on Mt. Sinai before receiving the Ten Commandments; rain fell for forty days during the flood in the story of Noah after which a new covenant was promised by God. These are two of the many references to the number 40 found in the Hebrew scriptures. Today we are challenged to enter into a deeper invitation to change and transformation in this ritual of fasting and prayer in the midst of the on-going conflicts and extreme social and political climate throughout our contemporary world. We have the privilege of choosing to fast while so many others face never-ending war and starvation. And perhaps that has always been the case throughout human history as is indicated in this passage written 800 years before Christ:
"Would that today you might fast so as to make your voice heard on high! Is this the manner of fasting I wish, of keeping a day of penance : That a man bow his head like a reed and lie in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? This rather is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke; Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own." (A portion of the reading for Friday, March 7th from Isaiah 58:1-9)
The origins of Ramadan go back to 610CE commemorating the appearance of the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad with the messages that subsequently became the Sacred Book known as the Qur'an. The Arabic ar-ramad, from which we have the word Ramadan refers to intense heat which certainly calls up images of the desert, and metaphorically, the inner process of silence and prayer and the empty feeling of fasting that makes space for the Divine within us that can transform and renew hearts and minds. It was in the city of Medina in the intense heat in this area that Ramadan was first observed in 622CE. Traditionally it is not until the 27th night of Ramadan, called Laylat-al-Qadr, that the very first words of Allah were heard by the Prophet Muhammad. For twenty-three years the prophetic messages were received by the Prophet and a way of life was established known as the Five Pillars of Islam.
Let us return for our further reflections today to Louis Massignon, the founder of the Badaliya prayer movement. His early devotion to Abraham, the Biblical Patriarch of all three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam is our starting point. Massignon spiritually identified with Abraham as the father of all three faith traditions, first through Abraham's own experience of the three mysterious visitors at Mamre and God's promise to make his descendants as numerous as the stars in the heavens or the grains of sand on the earth even at his advanced age. Then through his two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. In 1948 Massignon insisted: "It has been Islam that has awakened the Christian in me for 40 years." He was well aware that his own experience of Islam in the Arabian desert that awakened his faith in God was also the experience of Charles de Foucauld and others as well. In fact, he felt that this was the authentic mission of Islam in the world. " As early as 1917 he wrote: "The goal of the Qur'anic revelation is not to disclose and to justify any supernatural data unknown up to its time, but to make minds rediscover, and to recall to them the name of God, the temporal and eternal sanctions, the natural religion, the primordial law, the very simple cult which God had prescribed forever, which Adam, Abraham and the prophets practiced under the same form".
At the time, his vision of the religious significance of Islam for both Christians and Jews was controversial and perhaps remains so for some today. "He called Muhammad a "negative prophet". He wrote: "It was Muhammad's vocation to reproach Israel for believing itself privileged to the point of awaiting a Messiah who was to be born of its race, and to reproach Christians for not recognizing the full significance of the Holy Table (Communion), and for not having yet achieved that rule of monastic perfection, called rahbaniya in Arabic, which alone creates the second birth of Jesus within them." This may not be familiar language for us today but it leads us directly to our Lenten and Ramadan experience of fasting and prayer.
We can discover in Massignon's understanding an on-going invitation for both our traditions. First, let us return to the metaphoric desert, the empty space within our solitary prayer that makes room for the Divine within us. It is the goal of monastic life (rahbaniyah) and the goal of the time set apart during both Lent and Ramadan for Biblical and Qur'anic reflection and silent prayer. Massignon challenges Christians to recognize the deeply powerful transforming significance of daily or weekly Communion, the Holy Table. For Christians, whose ancestral Apostles were all of the Jewish faith, the long awaited Messiah was born, and yet not recognized by all, since His welcoming Messianic message of all-inclusive and self-sacrificing love for all of humanity was not what was expected. Massignon knew that his conception of three Abrahamic religions is a profoundly Islamic idea. In 1953 he wrote: "The Muslim who believes in the original equality of the three Abrahamic religions, Israel, Christianity and Islam, know they refer to the same God of truth." Massignon's views were born "out of his own experience of devotion to Saint Abraham and a personal encounter with God which he experienced in solidarity with living companions, both Christians and Muslims, and in solidarity with Christian and Muslim figures from the past like Saint Francis of Assisi, Charles de Foucauld, Salmon Pak, al Farisi and al-Hallâj," all making up a spiritually alive presence in his life in a vast Communion of Saints.
This time is set apart for Christians and Muslim believers to reflect deeply on exactly what it is we do believe based on our own personal experience of the Divine movement of the Spirit in our lives. This is what Massignon's experience and reflections invites us to undertake. "Massignon's 'credo' on the subjects of Muhammad, the Qur'an, Islam, the patriarch Abraham, and Arabic language is unique among the Christian theological views of the 'other' in the twentieth century." Given the reality of our experiences of the "other" in the twenty-first century, the growing fears of immigrants and refugees, social isolation, increasing nationalism causing extreme political divisions, as well as extreme ideologies, both cultural and religious, and the on-going buildup of weapons of mass destruction, war and violence, can our shared practice of Lent and Ramadan be a source of renewal, reconciliation, and the sense of inner peace that inspires us to the social action that the ancient prophet Isaiah so clearly identified as the will of the God of Abraham?
Let us pray that our energy be renewed sufficiently to become who Jesus called us to be: "Blessed (or happy) are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God." (Matthew 5:9)
Peace to you and yours,
Blessed Lent and Ramadan,
Dorothy
See www.dcbuck.com for all past letters to the Badaliya and Peace Islands