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.

The Five Pillars: Shahada (No god but Allah...)

When I came up the stairs in the Hindu temple from Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam's concert, I was running a bit late to return my rented car, but I wanted to see inside the worship space. I hadn't even peeked in before, while I was asking the man in the lobby shop where to buy my concert ticket, so after reading a couple of posted signs to try to ensure I wouldn't be breaking any rules by entering, I stepped from the lobby into the worship space.

The Muslim worship spaces I have experienced are empty, with rugs on the floor for praying. The Jewish worship spaces I have experienced have tended to be furnished with rows of chairs with arms, like a theater, with great variation in the style of ark situated in the front. Christian spaces, of course, have pews, with or without a baptismal pool or font in the front. The Hindu worship space surprised me in its difference.

Whether rugs, chairs, or pews, the monotheistic spaces are designed to arrange the worshippers in rows, facing forward, toward one thing: the ark, the East, the cross, whatever. The Hindu space (as perhaps I should have predicted, but did not) had no single focal point. Rather, the space contained shrines to 16 different named gods. The space was not quiet. People were talking and children were running around. Some people stood or bowed before particular shrines, others were simply sitting on the floor in lotus position, not apparently focused on any shrine in particular.

My instinct was to walk through the space and investigate each shrine one at a time. I walked up to Vishnu's space, because his was one of the largest, and because the depiction of the figure inside was different. Whereas many other shrines depicted a seated, standing, or dancing figure, the object inside the Vishnu shrine looked more like a corpse, or more specifically like a sarcophagus. There were flowers and bananas left on the stairs up into Vishnu's space and a sign at the top of the stairs reserving the inside of the shrine for priests only.

Next to me, a woman fell to her knees before the shrine of Hanuman (a god who symbolizes devotion to selfless service and humility), and pressed her forehead to the floor. This shrine also bore a sign reserving its inner space for priests, and the figure of Hanuman sat in a recess behind a curtain that could be closed. Next to the woman on the floor, another shrine, to I know not which god, had its curtain closed, and a living figure -- presumably a priest -- was moving around inside.

The rebuke from the woman at my last iftar rang in my head: "You can't be a religious tourist. Those people are there to pray."

I questioned my instinct to walk from shrine to shrine, wondering if treating the worship space like a museum might be unkind. Then I thought the better comparison might be to a Catholic, walking the stations of the cross -- something I have never done. I let the pressure of the car reservation make my decision for me, and after admiring only about a quarter of the shrines, I went back outside to collect my shoes from the cubby.

What would even the progressive Muslims of the suburban iftar have made of this temple, I wondered.

I have heard Christian sermons condemn Hindus for praying to "idols," and at the suburban iftar, I heard Richard (the convert from Christianity) criticize their polytheism as well. He mentioned it in the context of criticizing Christians for being "like the Hindus" in their worship of a three-part god.

"How is that monotheism?" Richard was asking a small group that had formed around him. "You've got Jesus, and you've got God, but Jesus is also God, and then there's this other thing, a ghost, and then you've got the Catholics, and they've got Mary all up in it too. And what's up with Mary always looking like some white woman from the Middle Ages? It's like, when somebody go all crazy and see Mary pop up her face on a piece-a toast or something, it always look like some white woman. And she’s a part of God too? What's up with that?"

The Trinity made sense to me as a child, but as an adult, I do feel like Richard has a point. I don't agree that the Hindus and Christians necessarily have it wrong somehow because their theism isn't as absolutely mono as Richard's, but I do see how being able to conceptualize God in three parts should put Christians in a bind to explain how they reject others who see even more parts to God, whether Catholics who add on Mary or the Saints, or Hindus who split the concept of God -- by some reckonings -- into millions of parts.

At the Kol Nidre service, we prayed to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Rebekah, the God of Jacob, the God of Rachel, and the God of Leah. I had done this before, but this year, for the first time, I heard the cantor explain her understanding of why we repeat the words "God of" each time.

"It's because each generation -- each person, really -- encounters God in his or her own way," the cantor explained. "We're not praying to this God of... a whole big group of people who always agreed on everything. We're praying to a God who was real to Isaac, and real to Rebekah, and to the rest, and we're honoring each of their encounters with the Eternal, as well as our own encounter."

So, by my count, that was seven gods at Kol Nidre. Or maybe a few hundred, if I'm counting the God of Jim, the God of Suzi, and the rest of the congregation celebrating High Holidays in the United Church.

When I went back to the United Church (aka Die Vereinigte Kirche) the following Sunday for Christian services, I wondered which God would be there. The God who just closed the gates in that same space on Thursday night? The God of the soprano cantor? The God of the woman who looked into my eyes and blessed me? The God of the Rev. Peter DeGroote, who would be preaching that morning? All of the above?

The giant banner depicting the Torah scroll had been removed from the cross at the front of the sanctuary, and on Sunday, the crowd was much smaller. Maybe 40 or 50 people attended services, most of them senior citizens and most of them women, including a returning pastor named Rita Horstmann, who was visiting from her home church in Cologne, having served as Die Vereinigte Kirche's German pastor in 2003 and 2004.

Rev. DeGroote was welcoming and kind, greeting me as an obvious visitor amongst the sparse crowd, since I was both male and off the average age by about thirty years. He and a younger pastor (who was about my age) wore black suits and clerical collars and no wedding rings. The younger man led us in song and prayer; the older man delivered a sermon based on the book of James (or Jakobus, as it was called in Der Bibel from the pew in front of me). The older reverend led us in some prayers as well.

We prayed to God, and we addressed one recited-in-unison prayer to "the Holy One," and we also prayed to Jesus, sometimes calling him Jesus Christ. We sang a song addressed to the "Spirit of the living God," which I had sung before at the Unitarian Church near my house. The song calls for the living God's spirit to "fall afresh on me ... melt me, mold me, fill me, use me" -- a very similar message to the "thou art the potter" hymn from my upbringing, and the God-as-potter song from Kol Nidre.

We also prayed pointedly to a Creator God (Brahma?), and we finished with the Lord's Prayer.

I know the Lord's Prayer. I have sung it and recited it hundreds if not thousands of times, sometimes with the language of “you“ and “your,” sometimes with the language of “thou” and “thine”… sometimes with "debts" and sometimes with "transgressions."

When I glanced at the upcoming text, printed on my church bulletin, I saw that Die Vereinigte Kirche addresses the Lord directly on the debts/transgressions line, using the phrasing "forgive us for wronging you” (no capital Y).

But that wasn't the only fresh aspect of their translation.

When Rev. DeGroote, and Rita Horstmann, and the senior citizens, and I, and the young, unmarried pastor all raised our voices to recite the Lord's Prayer to God, we said:

"Our Father and Mother in heaven, holy is your name."