Eid al Adha: Stone the devil and slay your son.

When I got home late one evening this week, my housemate Jennine was in the kitchen with the remaining guests from a dinner party she had hosted, and everyone was taking turns washing the dishes.

Our mutual friend Mohammed had been one of the guests, and he stood at the sink, wrist-deep in suds. The remnant of guests was a bit past tipsy, and they were talking about sex. There were groans and disagreements when I tried to change the subject to ask Mohammed about Eid al-Adha and the recent Hajj, so I combined the subjects and asked him if he had a story that could combine content about the Hajj with content about sex. As it turned out, he did.

Mohammed told us all about one of his several visits to Mecca during the Hajj from while he was living in Saudi Arabia.

As I learned back in September, the men and women worship together in Mecca during the Hajj, and Mohammed's story had to do with both the traditional gender-mixing and the type of clothing that Muslims wear during the Hajj. He explained how he was dressed in a seamless garment on his Hajj visits, an outfit that felt like nothing more than a couple of towels wrapped around his body. He described how packed-together the millions of pilgrims are as they circumambulate the Ka'aba, and he told a story of being pushed so close to the woman in front of him that he felt his penis slot snugly into the cleft of her behind. He wasn't sure how to correct the situation before before the thronging masses solved the dilemma for him by knocking him to the ground and trampling him.

Mohammed, bloodied, escaped the inner courtyard near the Ka'aba and made his way to the outer reaches of the Grand Mosque to tend to his wounds. From this entire startling story, my primary take-away was the new-to-me fact that the Grand Mosque contains escalators, which Mohammed described ascending to escape the hoards of pilgrims and nurse his injuries.

The conversation pleased me, because Eid al Adha was more than one week ago, and I did nothing to commemorate it, which means I have been struggling about what to write about for this blog. I finished reading a book about Islam, No god but God, by Reza Aslan, if that counts, but I guess overall you could say I sacrificed my project for Eid.

I did look for a way to celebrate, but all of the local Eid sermons that I found were scheduled to be delivered in the morning on a Monday when I had to be at work and couldn't get away. I couldn't get away for the following Friday's sermons either, and that was that. Eid was gone.

Eid is the holiday most closely connected with the Hajj pilgrimages, so I rationalized that since I certainly couldn't get to Mecca, missing the holiday was okay. I'd already had my Hajj to San Francisco, to Saratoga, to Berkeley, to Kentucky. I did consider how to treat Eid as I had treated Rosh Hashannah, with a private acknowledgement, like the tearing of the bread into the creek, and yet the honest truth is I did and do not feel so compelled by two of the primary activities of Eid: commemorations of the stoning of Satan and Abraham's willingness to slay his son on God's command.

I get it that stoning Satan means rejection of temptation to evil. I get it that the message is positive. But do I feel moved to recreate for myself the experience of a mob of religionists hurling rocks? Not really. That's just fucking scary.

I considered that it might be cathartic to go to the park and hurl rocks at trees or something to vent my rage. Perhaps it represents an appropriate role of religion to offer humans the chance to express agression in a controlled, designated space. And yet people get trampled during the Hajj regularly, and I feel like coming together with millions of people to throw rocks is a recipe for certain disaster. Aren't there other avenues that humans have for acceptably venting our rage? Sports? Sex? Art?

Over the summer, I acted in a play that required me to punch another man in the stomach and scream in his face. It was my most difficult scene and the most cathartic. Also, there's this: during last week, I went out drinking late with colleagues and found myself devolving into a shouty drunk. I embarrassed myself with my aggression (which is out of character when I am drunk), but quite frankly I woke up the next day quite refreshed. So, maybe that sad episode substitutes for my own rock-hurling for this year. It wasn't exactly a rejection of temptation, of course, because I wasn't very nice while I was a shouty drunk... but perhaps religion should offer a way to channel rage, so that we don't end up expressing it rudely and with a lack of compassion in a public setting.

As for the sacrifice of Ishmael (as the Muslims have it), or Isasc (as the Jews and Christians have it), I am at a loss.

Yes, I get it that sacrifice is a good thing too. Selfishness is bad, while sacrifice for the greater good helps us recognize that we as individuals are not the center of the universe. Fair enough.

Maybe my purchase last week of a cow from Heifer International as a Christmas present counts for this?

Perhaps. Otherwise, there's just no way I can replicate, meaningfully, for myself the story of a father willing to murder his son for his god. This story has been found to be compelling to all three groups of "people of the book," and connects with a bright line to the primary mythology of the religion of my upbringing, and yet I find it perverse. Not only do I find it perverse, but I fail to understand how any modern human can find meaning and motivation in it.

Sacrifice, yes, fine, theoretically. But murder?

If I were writing a foundational story for a religion, the story would be the absolute opposite. Abraham would tell his god to go fuck himself, and yet the result, god's promise to Abraham that he will become the father of great nations, would likely be the same. But Abraham's reward would be for the strength of character to reject a horrific command, even from a god. God would tell Abraham that he has passed a test, and his future generations would not have to wrestle with the hideousness of a foundational story involving such an inappropriate relationship between a father and a son.