I’m a Catholic priest who fasts for Ramadan. Here’s what it taught me about Lent.
Photo by Rauf Alvi on Unsplash
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Several years ago, not knowing at all what it would entail, I Googled a question: How do you keep Ramadan?
In the spring of 2019, after a series of high profile attacks on Muslim people in New York City and a reported rise in Islamophobia, I felt compelled to act in tangible solidarity with this vulnerable and targeted community. It just so happened that Ramadan was starting the next day. I decided I would observe its discipline of fasting as a way of accompaniment and solidarity.
I knew this sacred time in the Islamic tradition meant abstaining from eating and drinking from sunrise to sunset, but I discovered it was even more rigorous. You fast from dawn—that is, even before the sun rises—until sunset. It also did not occur to me then that when Ramadan (…