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.

Ramadan, part two (prayer and meditation)

I do not pray.

I had not taken this into account when deciding to observe Ramadan this year. I'm nearly a week into the month, and I have continued to put off adding the five daily prayers of Islam into my practice.

So, on Saturday, I set out to learn what kind of prayer should be said in the following morning. I decided I would start slowly, and on Sunday I would say only the salat al-Fajr, as accompaniment to my morning meal. Then, I thought, I might add one prayer per day until complete.

I did of course assume that any prayer I might find would be addressed to God.

While this conflicts with my atheism, long association with my religious family has taught me to translate prayers into a language that makes more sense to me, which is what I assumed I would do with the Fajr. I speculated that as a morning prayer, it might likely take the form of thanking God for the day, which I would translate into generalized gratitude for the start of the morning. Or it might ask God for strength and courage to go out into the world, which I would translate into a rumination on the strength and courage I might find within.

However, what I found while looking for sample Fajr prayers is that the subject of the Fajr prayer is largely God himself. Allahu akbar, and so on. "Glory be to You, O Allah!" "Yours is the praise and blessed is Your name." "I seek refuge in Allah from the accursed Satan." Etc. Etc.

I do feel somewhat like I am being untrue to the spirit of my intention to explore the world's religions when I reject elements that don't ring true with my worldview, but that's exactly what I did.

I came across a drawing of a man saying his Fajr on a prayer rug and noticed that his pose looked very similar the “child's pose” in yoga. Because yoga is as disciplined a practice as prayer, I felt I had found a compromise, and that yoga would be a suitable substitute. I told myself that if I were to find, while doing yoga, some sort of desire to "pray" or "meditate," then I would, but I would not force myself.

So, on Sunday, I rose early, consumed the early meal, and did fifteen minutes of yogic stretching while listening to "Speaking of Faith" on NPR.

The guest was Dr. Esther Sternberg, a scientist of Jewish heritage who studies the connection between stress and disease, as well as the opposite of that -- the connection between belief and healing.

When the host asked Dr. Sternberg, "What do you mean by belief?," my ears perked up. “Good question,“ I thought. “Belief in what, Dr. Sternberg?"

But Sternberg punted and rambled and did not answer the question.

I finished my yoga without praying or meditating, and dressed for Quaker meeting.

I was to meet my friend, an old housemate of mine, in the garden next to the Friends meetinghouse, about a 25 minute walk from my apartment. I arrived early, so I could read a sura from the Koran while I waited.

When my old housemate arrived, she showed me around the building, and explained that there are three services held there: the early, smaller, silent meeting that we would be attending; a larger meeting that is also largely silent but punctuated by "spoken messages;" and a "special welcome" meeting for gays and lesbians, which my friend had never been to.

She showed me into a small room called "the parlor" where the small, silent meeting would take place.

The room was furnished with antiques, and the walls were lined with bookshelves. Two windows showed tall hedges outside and did not let in light. A mantelpiece was topped with a small ticking clock. An older woman in a sweatsuit and sneakers sat on a crimson chair with wooden arms. An older gentleman in a suit with a T-shirt and shiny, polished black shoes sat at one end of a narrow sofa. I said hello to them, and felt very loud when I did. They nodded their greetings back.

My friend took one end of another narrow sofa, and I sat in a matching crimson armchair. It was 8:59. Another older woman entered and sat next to me just before 9AM, and five more Friends trickled in during the first five minutes of Meeting, bringing our number to a gender-balanced ten. The last to arrive was an old man with restless legs who shook the books on the shelves when he trotted his knees up and down.

Other than the fidgety old man and occasional crossing and uncrossing of legs by others, there was no movement. The sounds were of the ticking clock and the birds outside.

What is everybody thinking about, I wondered.

Are they ... praying? Meditating?

I find it difficult to clear my mind of thoughts, and so my mind ranged widely across topics, most of which were no doubt improper for the Friends' meeting: my schedule for the week, my schedule for the day, the physical appearances of the others in the room, speculations on the others’ thoughts, speculations on the schedule for their days, questions for Dr. Esther Sternberg, yoga, sex, Ramadan, food, imagined conversations with friends and family, imagined instructions to myself to still my mind, reflections upon the furnishings and mood of the room.

In the church I belonged to growing up, time for silent meditation was brief and targeted. It occurred immediately following the taking of communion, and lasted for the length of one hymn on the organ. At Meeting, I let my mind recall the feeling of taking communion as a child, and how surprised I had been, around age ten, when my Sunday School teacher informed me it is a sin not to think about Jesus and his sacrifice during the organ music after consuming the wafer and the grape juice.

I had been baptized at age nine, and not all of my peers were baptized yet (meaning they could not take communion, and therefore did not have to worry about this sin), and I remember taking note that I had a potential sin in front of me that they did not. I remember being a child whose mind would wander after communion, only to be yanked back to Jesus as soon as I realized it, along with a quick and fervent prayer for forgiveness from Him of my wandering-mind sin.

Is there any particulary topic toward which I should yank my mind right now, I wondered to myself in Quaker meeting.

At around the forty-five-minute mark, a happy random thought about my sister and my childhood caused me to break out in a smile, which I instantly wiped away, feeling excessively emotional. I'd perceived no other signs of feeling in the room. Ten minutes later or so, some sad thoughts about lovelessness and betrayal caused two fat tears to well up and then to fall, one from each eye. Sitting silent in the peacefulness of the Friends' parlor, I felt like maybe a manic-depressive for such outbursts of emotion.

Moments later, my friend called the meeting to a close. At 10AM sharp, she spoke: "Good morning, Friends," and we all rose to shake hands with one another, me with two wet spots on my shirt that appeared to go unnoticed. My friend made a few small announcements, and we were dismissed.

I wanted to talk to her about what Quaker meeting means to her, but she had a brunch to go to right away, and besides I am fasting, so I hope to attend one (or probably both) of the other meetings, and corner my friend (who was reared without religion at all) about her choice to throw in with the Quakers.