Spiritual Disciplines

As I look at the daily life of my Muslim friends, I am amazed at the way their lives are very disciplined around their religion. Religion visibly impacts and guides many of their actions. The fact that their every day is built around 5am wake up to pray followed by 4 more interruptions during the day, is very impressive. I have a lot to learn. When we first came, I would use the call to prayer to lift up my own prayer. But now we barely hear the call to prayer, as it is so much a part of our life. Occasionally, I use it to pray, but not often enough.

Ramadan is approaching, most likely starting Tuesday, depending on the local Imam seeing the moon. This is a time they use to remember Muhammad's first revelation and is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. In addition to their typical 5 prayers a day, our friends will be fasting throughout the daylight hours for a month (14ish hours currently). They will not eat or drink anything! On top of the typical difficulty of this, our friends will be dealing with the hot season in the Sahel (meaning 110 heat with no AC).
Although many of our friends are what we might consider nominally Muslim or Muslim in practice, their life is filled with religious disciplines. We just came through a spiritual season of Lent, but sometimes for me it takes getting out of the common routines to 'wake' me up. This is the beauty of sharing across cultures and religions. We can challenge each other to do better and be better through sharing. Spiritual disciplines are not what I organize my life around, but now I am challenged to make them have a more prominent role. And so I am very grateful for the disciplined example of my friends as Ramadan approaches. This Ramadan I am going to fast from some specific things in my life.  I'm also going to try to schedule my life around my spiritual disciplines instead of fitting them in where it's convenient in my schedule.

--La Maestra