Navaratri (Thank you, India.)

Navaratri, a nine-day Hindu celebration of various manifestations of the Divine Mother, began last Tuesday, triggered by the same new moon that ended Ramadan and began the Jewish New Year. There's no way I can deny that I felt my heart leap when I first discovered that this holiday is meant to honor the goddesses.

I grew up with a Father God. This Father God has a Son, who lived and walked upon the Earth inside a male body. I have even met Christians who will insist that the Holy Ghost is male, meaning that the entire Trinity can be considered -- apparently -- as just a big all-male three-way, with the unmistakable understanding that THERE IS NOTHING FEMALE ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN GOD. Period.

So, after a month of focus on the Father God of Islam... and his male prophet... and the male-dominated worship spaces at the mosques, the sense of relief and balance that Navaratri might bring felt exciting to me.

Navaratri spends nine days and nights honoring the sacred embodiment of creative and feminine energy -- Shakti.

The holiday is divided into three parts, with three nights apiece devoted to a different goddess, each of whom represents a different facet of Shakti’s divine feminine power. The three first days and nights go to Durga, a fierce warrior goddess, consort of Shiva, and the mother of Ganesha. She rides a tiger and slays demons. The second three go to Lakshmi, consort of Vishnu, and giver of physical wealth. She is also closely associated with the upcoming holiday of Diwali. The final three nights belong to Saraswati, consort of Brahma, supreme goddess of wisdom and the arts. She is often depicted as a river, or as connected to rivers or water.

When I set about finding a Navaratri celebration in my area, I quickly learned that all of the Hindu temples are in the suburbs. I found two temples from which to choose, as well as one Hindu organization planning Navaratri celebrations for various school and university auditoriums in Maryland and Virginia. I was leaning toward a Saturday night celebration at a university, when I discovered an afternoon concert planned for 1PM at the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple in suburban Maryland.

The flyer I found announced that Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam would be providing vocals, with Avaneeswaram Vinu on violin and Shertalai Ananthakrishnanan on mridangam, a type of South Indian drum.

Perfect, I thought. If gay men know how to do anything worshipful, it's how to revere female vocalists as the incarnation of goddesses. So, I will go listen to Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam sing. It will be a good excuse for me to show up at the Hindu temple for the first time, and it will connect to the theme of the holiday. Perhaps I will consider attendance at the concert to be my worship of Saraswati, and her connection to music and the arts.

Instead of biking, I chose to rent a Zipcar for the 17-mile trip.

The Sri Siva Vishnu Temple is located on a winding two-lane road accessed from a much larger suburban artery lined with strip malls, fast food, and gas stations. It is tucked away on this largely residential street behind some trees, much less obvious from the road than the houses behind their flat lawns. A sign in the full parking lot directed overflow traffic to park at the nearby Greek Orthodox church.

I did this, and then walked back to the temple on the shoulder of the road.

The temple is all white, with red doors. The basement of the temple isn't visible at the first approach, but can be accessed via a descent to the parking lot behind the building. From the front, a pedestrian can walk directly on top of this basement, onto a wide walkway with stone railings that encircles the main floor. On top of this, five tall, white, tapered peaks, inlaid with figures and carvings, set the building apart as a special kind of gathering place.

As I walked up to the walkway by the temple, I saw a sign that stated: "NO smoking, NO alcohol, and NO non-veg on premises. This includes parking lot."

The main entrance to the temple was in the rear, up a set of tall stairs from the parking lot, with the already elevated walkway around the temple leading directly to the main door. Outdoor cubbies clearly meant for shoes lined the walkway, so I shed my shoes and socks before going inside, though I missed the foot-washing station just inside the door.

The lobby just inside the front vestibule spanned the width of the temple. To the right, the walls were lined with shrines. In front of me, archways opened into the primary worship space. To the left was a small store with books and DVDs and incense, and next to the racks of retail goods stood a man behind a counter with a money box. I asked if I should buy concert tickets through him, and he directed me down a staircase to the basement.

The smell of curry grew stronger as I descended, and downstairs I found a tableau not that different from the basement of the church I grew up in. A lower-level lobby sat beneath the upstairs lobby, with doors opening into classrooms, restrooms, and a fellowship area connected via a serving window to a kitchen. Here, families sat together eating lunch from styrofoam plates.

Next to the fellowship area, doors opened into an auditorium filled with plastic blue chairs facing a stage draped with rust- and saffron-colored cloths. A chest-high goddess statue with four arms and a raised leg stood to the side of the stage.

It was here that I paid my $15 for the concert and took a seat.

When the musicians entered, they took their places on a low platform at the center of the stage set with three microphones. Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam sat cross-legged at the central microphone and faced the audience. She wore an orange and green sari, a large, bright red bindi, and a gold necklace, with her hair pulled into a loose knot behind her neck. Her male accompanists, both in kurtas, one grey, and one rust-colored, sat on either side of her and faced each other.

Without comment to the audience, Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam then proceeded to sing ragas for three hours without a break. She acknowledged applause with a namaste, but otherwise did not appear to respond to the crowd. Often, I found myself with my eyes closed, transported by the music to a place where blanking out my mind was easy. Sometimes, the more upbeat songs made me want to dance, though I noticed the audience remained mostly motionless, and I noticed that Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam herself limited her movements to keeping the beat with one hand slapping against her thigh. Less often, but frequently enough to notice it, I grew bored, with the unfamiliar words to the songs blending together and starting to sound "all the same" to my ignorant ears. At the two-and-a-half hour mark, I had to step out to phone the car company to extend my reservation.

At 4PM, a barefoot, bald man in a blue shirt and grey slacks took to the stage to announce that the concert must end, because some women needed to prepare the basement auditorium for another use later in the evening.

The man heaped praise upon Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam, three times calling her voice "melifluous." He was right. She was beautiful and entrancing. (If we have art, why do we need religion?)

"I hope you noticed how our musician today chose her ragas based on our season of Navaratri," the man said, though his thick accent and frequent use of long proper names made his speech difficult for me to follow. "Especially, I noticed her focus on Lakshmi, since today is one of her days."

The man took a few moments to praise the three goddesses of Navaratri for their gifts, and reminded us all that the primary Trinity of Hinduism -- Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu -- are nothing without their female consorts. He focused especially on the relationship between Vishnu and Lakshmi, since it was Lakshmi's day, and gave an example pulled from contemporary headlines.

"Just look at what's happening in our country now, with the economy melting down to nothing," the man said. "But what can the Protector do… what can Vishnu do to protect us without money? And where do we turn when the problem is with money? To Lakshmi."

Then a male priest in traditional dress with a grey topknot of hair and a red bindi entered the stage with a giant silver platter of fruits. The man in the blue shirt explained that the priest would now offer a traditional blessing to the musicians to thank them for their appearance today.

The priest offered his blessing, while each of the musicians touched a finger to a substance apparently pooled on the platter and rubbed the finger along their skin, around their necks and behind their ears. Then, each member of the musical Trinity selected a fruit, and took a bite.

The audience was leaving, so I went upstairs to check out the main worship space, before the reservation on my car ran out.

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.