Epiphany: "Manifestation, Journey, Discovery"

The Church of the Epiphany, an Episcopal congregation located two blocks east of the White House, seemed like a good choice for celebrating the Christian holiday of Epiphany, the first explicitly Christian holiday I've blogged here, given the recent conspicuous absence of Christmas.

I visited the gym and the farmers' market in the morning before 11AM services, and planned a movie screening for afterward at a nearby cinema.

Epiphany celebrates the visit of the Magi from the East to worship the infant Jesus, after following his star -- the primary instance I can think of that allows a celestial body to hold sway in Christianity.

The church bells were playing Christmas carols ("Joy to the World," "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear"as I approached on foot, noticing a sign by the door that requested appropriate attire and no sleeping on the pews. An apparently homeless man stood on the front steps, and several more homeless men sat amongst the congregants inside, managing to stand out in an already apparently racially and economically diverse bunch.

I sat on a red, velvetty, padded pew, and failed to cross myself or make any sort of bowing or curtsying motion before sitting down. I always forget which branches of Christianity make such a display customary.

The cavernous space of the sanctuary included a deep, recessed area behind the altar that seemed almost caged. A metal latticework that remained decorated with the wreaths and greenery of Christmas divided the worship space from a recessed area wherein the organist and trumpeter took up residence, and which served as one of two areas for the choir to sing. Over the arch of the cage was a slogan painted in foot-high letters: Blessing and Honor, Glory and Power Be the Lord's Forever.

The side walls bore stained-glass windows, and brown support beams crossed the stained white dome of a ceiling, which was peeling paint and openly crumbling in places.

I saw two people, a man and a woman, scurry down the aisle past me, laughing, each clutching an ornate two-foot-high golden statue of a human figure, their white robes fluttering as they passed.

Soon enough, the service began, with congregants rising to sing "We Three Kings," as a processional entered the sanctuary from the rear, leading the choir throughout the space as we all together sang all five verses of the hymn. Near the front of the processional marched the white-robed man and woman, holding their statues aloft. A third white-robed figure held a third golden man high, along with other marchers who bore banners and candles, and one woman holding a golden book above her head.

The marching of a sacred text around the space (up the center aisle, down the right side, up the center, down the left side, and up the center again) reminded me of the Torah's circumambulation of the congregants in the synagogues I have visited, and I felt myself wishing for a tallis so I could touch its tassels to the Bible being toted around.

It wasn't the only moment that recalled a Jewish service to me. At one point the pastor performed a solo a cappella chant in stitled English that sounded for all the world like a Hebrew blessing to my ears. At communion time, we sang about Jesus as our Passover, in addition to the many times Jesus was invoked (as he always seems to be around Christmas time) as the King of Israel. There was even a public prayer interlude, the most moving moment of the service, which recalled the communal al-chet last fall during Yom Kippur. At the Church of the Epiphany, congregants were allowed and encouraged to lift up public, spoken prayers, signaling that they were finished with the words "Lord, in your mercy," to be followed by the congregants chanting: "Hear our prayer."

For my sister who's battling colon cancer, Lord in your mercy. Hear our prayer.
For president-elect Barack Obama, and the incoming administration, Lord in your mercy. Hear our prayer.
For our men and women in uniform, Lord in your mercy. Hear our prayer.
For the victims of torture worldwide and for all those involved, Lord in your mercy. Hear our prayer.
For the Israelis and the Palestinians, Lord in your mercy. Hear our prayer.

This last one seemed especially poignant. The first song of the morning had included the lyric: "They will call you, The City of the Lord, The Zion of the Holy One of Israel/Violence will no more be heard in your land, ruin or destruction within your borders."

The message of the pastor, however, was not so poignant. It seemed unfortunately similar to a budget meeting at the non-profit organization where I work. The Church of the Epiphany was apparently down 170K in contributions as of September, but finished the year a little better (but still behind), around 70K down.

The pastor pointed out that the building needs restoration and the church's programs need funding. He asked everyone to pray about the situation and to fast during the week ahead for guidance about what to do ("We Episcopalians aren't so good with the fasting, but I think that's what we're called to do."). The sermon was literally all about money this week, and the hard times non-profit organizations like churches find themselves in.

For what it's worth, the sermon was effective. I rarely toss in money when I'm visiting a new church, but I tossed in two shiny golden dollars that were in my pocket -- not a lot of money, but I was reminded of the widow woman in the New Testament whose two coins were praised by Jesus as a great gift. I did not, however, choose to participate in Communion, which at this church involved stepping into a side-room for the laying on of hands and anointing with oil following the wafer and the wine.

We finished the service singing "The First Noel," and then we were dismissed with an exhortation: "Let us go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit."

The pastor stood by the door on my way out, and invited me to the Epiphany feast, though I told him I could not stay. I was running late to catch the matinee of Milk.

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.

Sukkot: Feast of Booths

"Have you shaken the lulav yet this year, my friend?" asked the man in the blue dress shirt, grey slacks, and black kippah. He wore tiny eyeglasses and sported a scraggly, uneven beard, and he held out to me the bundle of the Four Species as I approached his sukkah.

"I have not," I replied.

"Do you want to shake it?" he asked me, waving the Four Species back and forth, and then, before I could reply, he asked a second question: "Are you of the Jewish faith?"

Of course I am not of the Jewish faith, but I had been looking for a way to observe Sukkot this week, and because I have been busy, my observations have so far all been of the mental variety. However, yesterday, on Thursday, as I was walking to lunch with a colleague, I noticed that the National Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation, had erected a sukkah in the park a block from my office building, two blocks from the White House. I did not wish to stop and visit with my colleague in tow, and we did not have time to do so anyway, but I held out hope that the sukkah would be there the next day, which is to say Friday, which is to say today -- and indeed it was.

Sukkot is a weeklong holiday that began on Tuesday, so today places us right in the middle of the celebration. For Sukkot, the faithful are instructed by God to construct a temporary house, or “booth” -- a hutlike space with a thatch-style roof for entertaining guests and observing the holiday. As I understand it, the hut represents the temporary dwellings carried across the desert by the Israelites during their forty years of wandering after escaping slavery in Egypt. The hut reminds us of God's faithfulness during difficult times, and that all things are temporary.

I find the reminder of life’s impermanence compelling, and the symbol of the hut interesting, but in actual practice, the demands of Sukkot seem culturally out of place for me as an urban apartment dweller. Just as hauling a Christmas tree into the living room seems better suited for a rural Bavarian farmhouse next to a pine forest than for my Washington, DC apartment next to a national park, so too does the sukkah seem better suited for a long-ago village settlement somewhere in the Middle East, where there is space to build, and where the palm fronds for the roof of the hut are plentiful.

As the holiday approached, I considered building my own sukkah in the alley outside my bedroom window, from whatever I myself might be able to scavenge from my own surroundings -- cardboard boxes from behind the local supermarket, perhaps, or fallen branches from the park, but I knew my free time would be short this week, and I wasn't sure the hut idea was truly meaningful to me anyway. Perhaps, I thought, I could make some temporary art instead, and I fantasized about some improbable projects like maybe a salt sculpture that would be washed away by the rain, or a Zen-garden-style space that I would rearrange each day of Sukkot.

Interestingly, when I went to scope out the alley, whether for a hut or a Zen garden or who-knows-what, I discovered a sukkah of sorts already sitting in my intended space. The apartment building in which I live happens to have some structural integrity issues, with the hundred-year-old mortar between its bricks continually crumbling out. This causes leaks into the apartments (I had soggy walls in my bedroom for a year), and over the course of the past two years or so, the management company has been replacing the mortar one section of wall at a time, with a new section tackled every few months or so.

When I walked into the alley on the first day of Sukkot, I discovered that the workmen had returned to repair a new section. They had erected a scaffolding for this task, and over top of the scaffolding they had flung a tarp. It looked like a close approximation of an urban sukkah (though it violated the rule that the roof must be organic), but I stepped inside underneath the tarp anyway, happy to have my booth appear by magic.

I went about my week, reflecting on themes of impermanence, reading the book of Ecclesiastes (already my favorite book of the Bible, and a required Sukkot text), and making plans to attend synagogue this weekend (tomorrow).

When I saw the booth in the park yesterday, I decided I should make time to stop by today, and experience the ritual apart from the synagogue. So at midday today, I wandered on over, hoping to spend my lunch break in the sukkah.

I approached from the rear and then walked around to the front, so I could apprehend the booth’s construction. The roof was made of some kind of fronds, balanced on top of a metal frame. Attached to the frame, white plastic walls with a blue stripe at the bottom hung toward the ground. The back wall contained a clear plastic window, and there was no front wall. The structure’s shape was that of a rectangle with twice as much length as witdth, about the size of a large van or a small truck cab.

It was when I had walked around the sukkah to the front that the man with the glasses and beard asked me if I wanted to shake the lulav, and then asked me if I was Jewish.

He actually pulled back a bit when I answered, “No.”

I thought he might then be interested in explaining the lulav to a Gentile, but that's not where he went next. I knew already about the lulav, from reading about it, but I kind of wanted the explanation from a practitioner. The lulav is a bundle of "Four Species": a frond from a date-palm tree, a bough from a myrtle tree, a branch from a willow tree, and a fruit from the citron tree. Some say that each of the four Species represents a part of the human body, such that binding them together represents a total devotion to God. Others say that the binding represents bringing various types of worshippers together before God.

I was curious which explanation (or perhaps a different one altogether) this fellow might give me, but instead, after asking if I am Jewish, he asked a second personal question:

"Are you religious?"

"I do not practice a religion; no." I replied.

"That's not what I asked you -- if you 'practice' a religion," the man quibbled. "I asked if you are religious. Do you believe in God?"

"No," I said.

The man holding the lulav literally jumped. He stiffened and he sniffed and he put the lulav back down on a table. Next he said, "Well, then, you will not want to pray."

"I do not know if I want to pray," I said, "What is the prayer?"

The man seemed confused and remained silent.

"Is it for guidance, or something?" I prompted.

The man launched into a hasty explanation that I did not follow exactly, but which could be summed up, I am pretty sure, as essentially the same as the five daily Muslim prayers: Thanks and blessings to God just for being God, who is great and awesome and so on, and thanks for putting together this religion for us to follow, amen.

Then the man told me he liked my beard, and said, "Good day to you; nice to meet you, my friend."

The words were spoken in kindness, but were clearly phrased as my dismissal. I wanted to talk more about Sukkot and what it means, and I wanted to understand the prayer more clearly, and most of all I wanted to be invited into the sukkah to sit on the chairs and maybe chat. I'm not always that willing to just talk with strangers, but the sukkah had a sign on it that said "welcome," and since they were in a public park, I assumed that the organizers wanted to talk to people about their religion. I assumed the non-Jewish and non-religious were being invited to learn more.

Also, a woman with a stack of six pizzas had arrived at almost the same moment I did, and she placed them on a table inside the sukkah, alongside several two-liter bottles of soda, some paper plates and cups, and a large, orange water cooler.

I did not really want any pizza (and I avoid drinking soda), but on my initial approach I had thought the man might welcome me into the sukkah for lunch.

Alas, I was wrong, so instead I just popped into a coffee shop for an afternoon pick-me-up and walked back to the carrots and dip waiting at my office.

The Five Pillars: Sawm (Fasting)

For the brand of Christianity I grew up with, fasting has been largely abandoned.

The only times I can remember fasting coming up in church was when the sermon or the Sunday School lesson would cover the section of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus teaches that those who are fasting should conceal the outward appearance of their hunger. Those who look somber while they are fasting are here termed “hypocrites,” and Jesus informs his audience that “your Father, who is unseen, and … who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

Growing up, I remember this fasting passage being used mostly as a metaphor. Though people fasted “in Bible times,” we don’t have to do that these days, it was implied, but we can learn how to keep our private struggles to ourselves and wait for our reward from God.

Reading through the book that Zaki the Ahmadi had given me, I learned that some Muslims take issue with a fasting-related edit that comes later in the book of Matthew. A story about the disciples trying and failing to cast a demon out of a boy ends with Jesus telling the disciples they have too little faith. Some manuscripts record that Jesus went on to say that such a demon will only come out “through prayer and fasting,” though this is relegated to a footnote in most current Bibles. According to The Introduction to the Study of the Holy Qu’ran, this is proof that even Jesus acknowledges that faith in Him alone is insufficient for salvation, absent prayer and fasting -- two of the Five Pillars of Islam.

“This criticism was so vital that Christians found themselves unable to give any reply,” states the Ahmadi text. “The only way of escape they found was in deleting the verse from the Gospel.”
I must admit that even in my well-marked copy of the Bible, I had never noticed this footnote before. My only margin-note on this passage was to write “faith in what?” next to where Jesus tells the disciples they haven’t enough “faith” within them to cast out demons. If I follow my scrawl correctly, my reasoning was that since Jesus wasn't dead yet, the disciples' faith couldn't mimic modern Christians' faith in the resurrection -- but if Jesus was in the process of bringing a new covenant to supersede Jewish law, would the disciples' Jewish faith in the God of Abraham be enough?

What were the requirements, exactly, of the nether-faith between the Covenants? (This question had troubled me early on, as a devoutly Christian child.)

In addition to the faith question, my scrawled Bible notes here include exclamation points and underlines of the quotes that reveal a sassy drama-queen Jesus who was fed up with His disciples.

"Oh, unbelieving and perverse generation," Jesus harrumphs. "How long shall I put up with you!"

You can almost see Him rolling his eyes, and hear the dramatic sigh. You can almost see the full sweep of his robe's sleeve as he gestures the next line.

"Bring the boy to me."

Then Jesus casts out the demon Himself, and then -- snap! -- he rips on the size of the disciples' faith in this well-known passage: “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

Having not tried my hand at casting out demons or moving mountains during Ramadan, I can’t say if my fasting would have helped, though I’ve no doubt that the “faith” component in me is significantly smaller than a mustard seed. I've no more idea what "faith" should mean for me in the 21st century than I do for the disciples in the 1st.

And while the fasting of Ramadan felt like useful practice, it did nothing to increase anything I could call "faith."

In fact, partway through Ramadan, I read some news that, if anything, diminished my faith. I was astonished to read a newspaper article about how fasting is dealt with inside some Muslim-dominant societies of the world. The article focused on young Muslims in Saudi Arabia who are working to "reclaim" Ramadan, reinstituting a focus on fasting, God, and attention to the poor. I was surprised to learn that this is not the focus for Muslims everywhere on Ramadan already.

Though I have been separated from Christianity for 17 years now, I have long been appalled by the commercialization of the holiday of Christmas. I find it shocking that a religion could allow one of its holidays to be cheapened and hijacked the way Christmas has, with its plastic trees and plastic, plug-in baby Jesuses and the profligate spending of money on plastic junk for kids. No other serious religion, I once sniffed, would let such an important holiday slide into popular decline like this -- and I held onto that opinion as an indictment of Christianity itself.

Well, no longer. The way Ramadan is apparently celebrated by many means I have to admit Islam to this club, and it's a shame. It's a shame because perversions of Islam are already given quite a lot of attention by those of us in the West, as we react to the latest subway bomb in Madrid or London, or hear of homosexuals being beheaded in Saudi Arabia, or worry about the next terrorist attack emerging from the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The perversion of Ramadan is far less immediately grave in its consequences, than, say, the idea of a jihadic struggle motivating murder. But much like the birthday celebration for a charismatic leader who preached about caring for the poor has become a reason to go into debt indulging in over-consumption, so too, apparently, has a fasting holiday emphasizing self-discipline become a feasting holiday tending toward sloth.

According to the article I read, many in the Muslim world deal with the difficulty of the fast by essentially turning day into night and night into day during the month of Ramadan. Since the entire society is doing this, it causes no problems, and life can continue as normal. You can get a dental appointment in the middle of the night; your work will adjust to accommodate the shift in daily habits.

As one young Saudi put it in the Washington Post article: "We replaced the pain of hunger during Ramadan with the pain of overeating and indigestion. We've turned it into a month of soap operas and entertainment, a month of the supermarkets. ... Instead of saying hello to the month that purifies us of sin, we're saying hello to the month of samosas, entertainment, soap operas and shopping malls."

Sounds like the Saudi version of American Christmas to me.

The group of people with whom I shared my last communal iftar of the month seemed to agree. Many of them had spent time in Middle Eastern countries and talked about the vast differences between their fasting experiences there versus in the United States.

"I would get up at four o'clock in the afternoon. It did not feel like I was fasting," said one woman. "People who got up earlier than that would complain about having to go four or five hours without food."

"Over there, they think we aren't having the real Ramadan experience in the US, because not everyone is doing it," said Richard (the man who had cautioned against worshiping the sun). "They focus on how we're a minority, and the culture doesn't accommodate us. But for us, we think we're having the deeper experience, because we have to fit this focus on God into our regular lives. We have to make sacrifices to worship."

Others chimed in with their own strategies and thoughts on how to fit the holiday into their lives as unobtrusively as possible for the Christians and atheists and other non-celebrants around them.

Everyone seemed to agree that they preferred the private fast to the public feasting, and it struck me that the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount would highly approve of these American Muslims.

Ramadan/Equinox (Mabon)

Timing my meals to sun-up and sundown these past few weeks, I had been especially mindful that we were heading toward the Fall Equinox, as both suhoor in the morning and iftar in the evening have been creeping toward 7 o'clock.

I understand that Equinox goes by the name Mabon for many Wiccans who celebrate eight sabbats (or solar holidays) per year, but I did not manage to find a Wiccan celebration in my area. I will, however, put some energy into finding one for Samhain, the sabbat holiday that falls on Halloween/All Souls' Day, in between the Fall Equinox and the Winter Solstice.

Even without a Wiccan or other religious connection, I have been interested for some time in celebrating the turning of the seasons. My interest began with the Winter Solstice, which I have celebrated for the past six years by hosting a brunch at my house.

At first, it just seemed a pleasant way to strip away the in-your-face cultural trappings of Christmas (and respect the religious traditions of my non-Christian friends) while opening my home for a gathering around the "holidays." I have tended to prepare a large bowl of eggnog, and occasionally to hang mistletoe, but otherwise to avoid seasonal references at the Solstice brunch. It's nice simply to celebrate the lengthening of the light in a secular way before boarding a plane to go back home and celebrate Christmas with my family.

Once I had started with the Solstice brunch, I had always thought I should stretch the tradition throughout the year, and this past spring I discovered a very good reason to do so. At the Spring Equinox, it turned out we were facing a truly amazing religious pile-up, so I convinced one of my housemates that a pan-religious springfest would be in order.

Six months ago, Friday, March 21, 2008 represented the convergence of six different religious occurrences. It was: a full moon, the Equinox (Ostara for Wiccans), the Jewish holiday of Purim, the Hindu festival of Holi, the Zoroastrian New Year (Norouz), and Good Friday. I was observing Lent at the time by not drinking, so I decided to break my Lent with the Equinox party – specifically with the Purim part of that party, since Purim actually requires celebrants to drink.

I was out of town during the Summer Solstice this year, but my housemates were on board when I suggested an Equinox/Ramadan occasion in our house this fall to continue marking the seasons with a display of hospitality and conviviality.

Guests were invited to arrive at sundown for iftar, and invited to stay as late as they liked to celebrate Equinox.

We prepared and served a mix of mostly traditional Middle Eastern food (tabouli, dolmas, falafel, baba ganouj, and so on), and I purchased some organic dates from the market, because I had read that dates are a traditional break-the-fast food for Ramadan.

Because I find the Equinox parties to be a good excuse for some sort of festive dress or change in appearance, I found myself thinking of what to wear as the sun was going down. At the Spring party, I had strung together a couple dozen tiny roses on a thread and tied it around my neck as a festive spring garland. For the Fall party, I selected an orange shirt from my closet to represent the changing colors of the leaves, and I wore it with jeans. I was lacing my sneakers when I was inspired by a memory of the cherry red toenail polish I saw one of my housemates wearing a day or two earlier.

I wandered down the hall to check what other colors my housemate might have, hoping I could match my toes to my bright orange shirt. She handed over a couple of colors that she thought might blend well together to become orange, and in fact they did. I ditched the sneakers for flip flops, and my toes were a shiny orange by the time our first guests arrived.

We had a gathering of eight for iftar, with most guests arriving much later; none of the other early guests had fasted. An Iranian friend (who is not Muslim, and who is more interested in pagan spirituality) arrived late for the iftar, having chosen to fast for one day in honor of the party. Mohammed arrived even later in the evening, having broken his fast at an iftar in the suburbs.

By midnight the apartment was full, and dancing had broken out in the living room. Mohammed had brought a bottle of fine scotch, which was shared amongst many guests who had already imbibed two bowls my housemate's rum punch -- as well as the various varieties of wine and beer on offer.

We closed up shop around 4:30 in the morning, less than an hour before devout Muslims would be showing up at the mosque for Fajr. One housemate had gone to bed hours before, and after cleaning up the house a bit with my other awake housemate, I stumbled intoxicated to my bedroom and slept until noon.

The next day was the first time I'd missed my early meal since Ramadan began, and the first time I'd missed my Fajr yoga session since I started it a few weeks ago. Though I had resolved to myself to wash at each prayer time on Saturday, after accepting the challenge from my friend, the former Muslim wife, I realized that I had missed both Maghrib and Isha on Saturday, as well as the Sunday Fajr.

I got out of bed at midday and did some more cleaning, feeling a slight hangover, and wishing I had remembered to eat a fortifying helping of leftover party food while I was putting it away in the wee hours. I wouldn't be eating again until iftar (at which point I planned to meet up with a group of progressive Muslims I met through Facebook).

An hour later I went into my bathroom to wash for Dhuhur. I soaped up my face and hands while standing before my sink and mirror, focusing on making myself come back to life after somewhat overdoing it the night before.

Then I stepped into my shower to wash my feet and surprised myself when I looked down and remembered my orange-painted toes. There are Muslim men the world over performing this exact same ritual today, I thought to myself. Are there any others who are chipping colored paint off their nails as they wash?