Incarnation: Ramadan 2008

This year, I make my third attempt at keeping the Ramadan fast. It’s more difficult than I anticipated, going without food and drink between the sunrise and its setting. The thirst gets to me most—it doesn’t really dull like hunger does, it narrows my attention and attention span. And, I’ve found, for me the thirsting builds across the month: each week is just a little bit more difficult to get through. So far, I haven’t made it through the 30 days.

And yet, something keeps drawing me to try. At first, it was a simply anguish about our war, a wanting to do something, however private that might be. Last year, a single word rose up, when I considered that this exercise was silly, self-indulgent (in a strange, religious, mortifying way). Atonement, which I’ve also seen broken, offered as at-one-ment. Fasting offered me a way to participate with Muslims in my neighborhood, my city, all across the globe, in just a single aspect of their life and faith.

This year, the word that bubbled up was Incarnation—the spiritual made manifest, the body. This year, my body has been more challenged and demanding than ever before—or at least, ever since the day I ran a motor scooter into a pizza delivery truck at 30 mph, my junior year in college. This year, I spent Valentines weekend in bed with Girlfriend, with the stomach flu. In April, I contracted Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and spent the whole feverish in bed and the first two weeks of May doing some serious recovery napping. A stubborn cold cost me a week in early August, and now there’s something strange occurring in my heel.

This year, I’ve learned surrender. Sickness has taught me to surrender to my body, to make peace with its limitations. In May, for instance, I discovered I could will myself awake for an entire day. And if I insisted on this consciousness, that’s the only thing I got—insistence and bare consciousness. I couldn’t keep a thought together, couldn’t get a lick of work pushed forward. Better to surrender, I soon realized, to take the necessary rest and come back to work when I was truly able.

This year—and this fast—have brought me other lessons about incarnation, other “gifts of the body,” to borrow the title of Rebecca Brown’s profound and lovely book.

The gift of physical yearning, of hunger and of thirst. Longing sharpens up my senses, slows down time, keeps me present and prevents a lot of grandiosity. During my recovery from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a simple nap dwarfed all other ambitions. By the end of a long hot day of fasting, I’ve no good ideas or grand ambitions left. My thoughts are leashed to the bottle of cold water, sweating on my counter, and the clock that moves so slowly toward the time I can partake of it.

The gift of gratefulness. Nothing feels more blessed than that first cool sip. I am reminded of the luxury of dreaming, that my capacity to look beyond my daily needs is really just an accident of birth and wealth.

The gift of physical joy. Our bodies bring us their own brand of gladness. Science calls a lot of this endorphins, but that doesn’t dim the fun. Pedaling through a rainstorm along the C&O canal, dancing at a wedding, making love—these are the things mere spirits can’t accomplish, although they may exult in and join the body’s celebration.

The gift of comfort. Having spent so many extra hours in our bed this year, I’ve come to love it extra specially. Not just—particularly not—when I’m recovering for illness or retreating from exhaustion. There is a simple, deep, and physical satisfaction that rises every evening as I climb into the covers with dear Girlfriend, as fit our bodies into sheets we’ve chosen and tucked in.

We picked this bed, we picked this house, we chose this life together, and somehow this is manifested here, in the soft welcome of the pillows and of one another’s arms. We talk, or sometimes we keep silence. We laugh and tease and share our tender fears. Something would be lost if I couldn’t feel the real warmth of her within these moments, if I did not see the morning sunlight, or the lamplight, even the too-bright streetlight on her face.

Every religion has its great ideas, many that could fill a worthy lifetime in their pursuit, their understandings. But the body, which receives the bread and wine—or which doesn’t, as the case may be—it has a holiness that’s all its own, a holiness that I encounter during Ramadan.

© 2008 Melissa Capers