It’s Ramadan. Every year at Ramadan I think about how much I’d really love to have Muslim friends. Right now the closest I can get to saying ‘I have Muslim friends’ is that my neighbor Helene, is Muslim-ish, and that Cate has two adorable little schoolyard buddies who are Muslim, one of whom even wears the veil. (You should see her self-portrait in the school hallway, it’s so adorable!)

I’ve been shamelessly using my six-year-old’s ‘connections’ for two years now, as I vie for an invite to Eid ul-fitir. I’m not getting very far. Here’s a feel for how my playground conversations usually go.

Urban Abbess: Hey Zainab! How are you?

Zainab: Good. (giggle giggle)

U.A.: Hey, it’s almost time for Ramadan.

Zainab: Yep! Then comes HALLOWEEN!!!!

U.A.: I’m trying to learn how to celebrate Ramadan. Do you think you could teach me?

Zainab: “its EASY silly, all you do is not to eat!

U.A.: Oh, right….and…um…don’t you also spend some times in your special holy book, the Qur’an?”

(A blank stare from Zainab and this response from her mother

Zainab’s Mom (a.k.a. Diane): “Well, we aren’t very good Muslims….”

Having failed on the cross-cultural bridge building front, I turn my intentions towards the half-assed Fast-of-Time and Holy Book Attention Reclamation Program that I engaged in last year – namely, doing lectio divina on scriptural passages and responding to them with collage.

I dug out my book on the Services of the Christian Year, edited by Robert Webber, only to find out that my copy is too old and the lectionary only went through 2005. So instead, I googled up a current year lectionary and found out that this week, we are in Esther.

Now, I’m pretty familiar with this story – being as it’s one of the few that feature women in the Bible – so I wasn’t so sure I could get much out of it, even with four read-throughs and a goodly time of meditation. But as usually, the practice of lectio divina brought me to an old story in new way. Here’s the bit that stood out to me:

The king asked, “Queen Esther, what is your petition? It will be given to you. What is your request? Even up to half the kingdom, it will be granted.”

Then Queen Esther answered, “If I have found favor with you, O King, and if it pleases your majesty, grant me my life – this is my petition. And spare my people – this is my request.”

Esther 7:1-3

And here’s the response:

Meditating on the phrases “What is your petition?” and “Grant me my life.” brought a lot of things to mind. I thought about the past year and my long and lengthy cries for healing when the migraines brought my life to a standstill. I thought about River and others in the Middle East who are literally hoping to retain their lives and the lives of their people. I thought about Sudan and Congo and wondered at how the women there continue to go on living in the reality of unthinkable brutality and loss.

Then, being an American, I thought about more trivial things – like that the images which define my life are all of beauty and books. And I wondered what that meant about how I was defining life – because usually I’m a big proponent of embracing the painful and dark parts of life as well and I was surprised that no images emerged for those things as well.

Finally, I started pulling pages out of magazines, hoping to find images that captured the two phrases. I culled out a stag; the word ‘essential’; hennaed hands reaching through barred windows; an arrangement of roses; scrollwork.

Eventually what emerged were two pages – one for each phrase. For the first I did an image transfer of the hennaed hands. The places where the image didn’t transfer fully were too stark white in contrast, so I pulled the tea bag out of my mug and aged the paper. Then I mimicked the scrollwork with a sepia art marker and wrote out the phrase: What is your petition?

For the responding page, I aged the paper with the remaining tea grounds then laid on two images of beauty – a bouquet of roses from a magazine cover, and a graphite transfer of an image from a coloring book. To honor the Islamic origins of this hybrid practice of mine, I include a beautiful little photograph of a Muslim girl reading the Qur’an in an alley. Finally, I tried mimicking the scroll work again and adding the phrase: Grant me my life.

I feel like I’ve already learned a lot from this meditation on Esther. It’s caused me to think about things big and little, and it’s pushed out the boundaries of how I define “life” and who I define as “my people.” It’s put me in touch with God’s generosity and my own hungry urgency; and it’s reminded me that beauty is essential for my breathing.

I on the less ethereal front, I’ve also learned a few things about the artistic process – like, don’t try to use art markers before the gel medium is all the way dry; and no matter how cocky you are feeling don’t do scrollwork or lettering free hand – pencil it in first! I was so disappointed when I messed up the lettering on the first page and the scrollwork on the second. It reminded me of the film Rivers and Tides that I saw about Andy Goldsworthy and his amazing artistic process. At one point Andy is making a web out of twigs (or was it ice sickles?) Anyway, near the end of the process, he applied one last piece…and the whole thing fell down. There was this terrible pause of realization, anger, and disappointment. Then, Andy gulped and shrugged and went home until another day.

As I flubbed the grey scrollwork and remembered that scene I thought “Yes, but Andy Goldsworthy is a full-time artist. At least he has more time than I.” But that’s not true is it? We all have the same time – sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day. It just matters how we use it. Time is not a renewable resource.

Tomorrow I’m planning on doing lectio with a passage from the Qur’an. I just ordered a simple paperback copy and have yet to dive into it. I was looking on line for some direction as to which portions of the Qur’an are most apropos for Ramadan, but alas, even Islam for Dummies could not help me. If any of you have any guidance regarding where to start, let me know. Otherwise I’ll just begin and the beginning.

See you tomorrow!