Fasting & Feasting

Ramadan is a time for prayer and fasting . . .

But in the evening it's a time for feasting!

Ifaar is celebrated at sun set when the days fast is broken and just prior to Isha, the evening prayer.

Here are some wonderful middle eastern recipes posted by one of the people in our group. If you want more mouth watering examples of Ramadan food check out Sara's blog site

Sep 26, 2007 (yesterday)
"Kunafa"
from Sara's Blog by Sara



Kunafa means a lot to Arab people, a special dessert, to be served everyday in Ramadan after breakfast. You can have them crunchy and round or soft and flat, there's actually lots and lots of shapes and sizes. Of course, Kunafa is served with a cup of tea with or without cream/milk. It is absolutely a must-have in any Ramadan visit to relatives or friends.



You buy the dough from the supermarket and mix it with some corn oil very well and spread it at the bottom of a oiled cake pan, in the middle you add a mixture of walnuts, raisins, coconut shreds mixed with sugar. Then, you add the top layer of kunafa dough and press down on it well. Now you can put it on the stove and keep checking the bottom layer until it's golden yellow and flip the cake pan over making the top layer at the bottom and wait till it turns golden yellow.

Of course, before all that you make the honey by mixing 2 ups of sugar with almost one cup of water and leave them on the stove to boil and thicken and voila! your kunafa's honey is ready.Add a cup of honey to the kunafa and leave it for a while, then ur kunafa is ready to be served with a cup of tea. LOL... Yummy!!


Sep 15, 2007 11:58 PM
Ramadan Secrets
from Sara's Blog by Sara

Now you're in on the most secret ingredient of Ramadan... LOL

It's called "Amar El-Deen" it's made of apricot fruit that has been hardened, gelatinized and sweetened. It is used a lot as a juice served with breakfast and Ramadan dessert just like Jelly. Decorate your dish with yummy raisins, coconut, crushed almonds and a sprinkle of cinnamon.




In order to serve this wonderful juice u need to soak a packet for 6 hours in a jug in water until it softens and vigorously stir it every few hours making a nice thick cup of Amar El-Deen. It's really sweet and healthy after fasting because your blood sugar drops during ur fast. This juice with its sugar content and fruit helps boost ur blood sugar a bit and gives u that extra energy to help clear the tables. LOL

Yesterday at the Masjid (Mosque) during the taraweeh prayer, the Imam finished the third section of the Qura'an which means Surat Al-Baqara has ended and 'Al-Emran has begun... Simply wonderful! I actually love praying in the Masjid's garden, they open it for prayers during Ramadan only and Eid. Just when you think the weather is getting a little hot, Allah sends a quiet cold breeze to help us through...
Subhan Allah, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful...
اللهم إنك عفو تحب العفو فعفو عنا

Read more!

What shape is your God box?

This time last year we spent a month in a small lakeside town a few miles south of Kathmandu. It was a quiet town but like most quiet towns, Pokhara had its share of drama. The most significant, during our stay, concerned several young Hindu girls who had to be taken to the local hospital after swooning and fainting as the result of an intense religious experience during a school retreat.

Nothing unusual about that, you might say, and you'd be right.

Young girls have been fainting and swooning for just about as long as God has been revealing Him/Herself to mankind. My point is that no matter what our cultural background or social world view is, if we are genuinely looking for God, He will reveal Himself to us, no matter in what context we interpret or perceive Him.

This has certainly been my experience in sharing Ramadan with my Muslim brothers and sisters this year. To my delight I've discovered God where I least expected to find him.

A friend who worked as a radio broadcaster in the days when it was call "The Wireless" said that radio is its own wardrobe mistress. By this he meant that because the medium was non visual, each listener was forced to imagine for themselves how each of the characters looked, thereby making each character unique to each listener.

If this is so, then why couldn't the same parallel be used to describe God, whom many of us have experienced, but none of us has seen.

Could it be that we simply interpret God as either Christian, Jewish Muslim etc according to our own cultural predisposition?

David du Plessis, a respected Pentecostal world leader and advisor to Pope John Paul II's Ecumenical Council in the 1980s was sent to Madgegoria to report on the sighting by several young children of the Virgin Mary.

In his report David said that whilst he personally had no paradigm to understand or interpret their religious experience in the terms they used, he had no doubt whatsoever that they had all had an intense personal encounter with the Living God, and quoted Jesus' own words

"By their fruits shall you know them".

Perhaps God is more interested in the fact that we respond to His initiative rather than the shape of the box we put Him in.

Read more!

Pickles, cheese, lettuce, onion and tomatoes.

Today is the end of the first week of Ramadan, and if there's one thing I learned so far, it's that Islam is a very uncluttered religious code.

Simply expressed there is one God, the God of Abraham, Isac and Jacob (same as Christianity and Judaism), Mohamed is/was His prophet and the the Muslim (believers) job is simply to worship Allah and live according to His word.

No complicated dogma, formula or theological premises, just 'Trust and Obey, as the old Christian Evangelical Hymn says.

And in it's simplicity there is beauty.

Like Christianity, Islam has made a major contribution to architecture, literature, art and astronomy and these are perhaps the world's best guarded secrets. The absolute breathtaking splendor of Khiva, Bukhara, Samarqand and Tashkent, which we were privileged to visit last year, are the equal of the ancient wonders of Egypt or the majesty of Rome, but unspoilt by commercial exploitation or physical decay. No ruins!

And all build & kept in perfect repair, simply to glorify God.

As I see it, our faiths are a bit like a hamburger, actually.

When you remove all the pickles, cheese, lettuce, onion and tomato, what's left is the bun and the pattie: and no matter what else you add, unless you have the bun and the pattie, you don't have a hamburger!

From where I stand today, the essence of our shared belief is God, and His word, the bun and the pattie of each of our faiths.

Anything else is just pickles, cheese, lettuce, onion and tomatoes.

Read more!

Seek first the Kingdom of God

This year I'm sharing a spiritual journey along with more than a billion others, as together we pray and fast for the Muslim month of Ramadan, the 9th month in the Islamic calendar.

Like Advent, Ramadan is a time of introspection. A time to focus on myself and God and my relationship with Him.

To check my progress on the plan He has for my life, and to put this relationship FIRST, above all other demands that my worldly life style would place as distractions from that purpose: the many distractions that, unless I stop and examine then, I scarcely realise have crowded Him out.

And this takes some doing!

Esentially the demands of Ramadan are simple, fasting during daylight hours, observing works of mercy and praying 5 times each day. Apart from the fasting, pretty basic Religion 101 stuff.

However, changing your daily routine to to make sure this actually happens requires planning and commitment.

It means,for example; cooking breakfast (ready to be heated next morning) before I go to bed, making sure my alarm is set so I wake in time to pray and eat before sun rise, planing my morning prayer BEFORE baby arrives at 7:00am, ordering daily activities in order to fit in other prayer & study times and watching I don't break my fast accidentally, like licking the spoon or tasting babies vegetables, making sure I have a well balanced evening meal ready for sundown!

Because I don't understand the Arabic prayers I need to plan my prayer regime as well. For me using the Christian Monastic Office is the easiest. The 5 daily set prayers, psalms, reading and intercessions seems to fit well. But it all takes forethought.

And most of all, time to reflect and listen to what God is saying to me.

All things we should all do every day: but how easliy and subtly life helps us put God on the back burner.

Read more!

Ramadan Kareem?

Ramadan Kareem? - Pretty much Happy Ramadan in Arabic. It's a traditional greeting and extends a wish that the person you are addressing will feel happy & strengthened by their fast.

Well this has been my first day of my first Ramadan and I have been privilege to share it with a small on-line group who have keep in touch with what they have been doing, and why. So it's been a great vantage point and enabled me to share in it from the inside, so as to speak.

The day begins with early morning prayer and a hefty breakfast before sunrise. As the Quran requires that you neither eat nor drink between sun rise and sun set it's important to get the blood sugar off to a good start and fuel up for the long day ahead.

Then it's pretty much business as usual till sunset.

The day is peppered with occasions of prayer. There are the 5 daily prayer times (Salah) which are formal prayers said in the home, or where ever, and there are spontaneous (D'ua) petitions and alms giving or Zakah.


Breaking of the fast happens at sun set when the whole community gather at the mosque (masjid) for evening prayers (Isha) and a communal meal called Iftar.

This is as much a social as a spiritual occasion with feasting and praying going on till late.

What struck me was the sense of excitement (passion even) with which everyone embraced a month which would demand so much of them physically and emotionally, but which they wouldn't miss for the world. Their expectations of personal renewal are high. Many even make lists of things they want to achieve (spiritually & emotionally) during Ramadan. I even read on the BBC web site that people from the remote hill provinces in Kashmir have moved into more populated areas just to be involved.

I'm no stranger to religious festivals, meetings etc but I've never struck such a sense of excitement or such a ready willingness to embrace personal hardship

. . . . . . just for the love of God.

Read more!

Autumn is a time to make ready

It's autumn in Albania now and our friends are working long hours to bring in the last of the summer crops and prepare for the cold winter days ahead.

Hay stacks are being covered, tobacco leaves and the last of the seasons capsicums have been cut and hung out to dry on the wire fences, fermenting grapes distilled into Raki and figs, apples, summer fruit & vegetables preserved.

Autumn is a very busy time.

Village men make sure the animal barns are warm and dry then scour the hillsides with their donkeys in search of fire wood so the family can cook and keep warm.

It's a very different picture from the one we are used to in an industrialized world where summer days are carefree holiday times. In an agricultural economy summer & autumn are times when we need to think ahead and work hard to be ready for the dormant winter months when work will no longer be possible.

I was reminded of this scene today by friends with whom I am sharing this internal voyage on-line. It's an inter-faith experience focusing on Ramadan, the 9th month of the Islamic calendar and has a harvest time theme unlike Lent, which is full of spring images.

The autumnal timing of Ramadan is in many ways more like Advent and this, mixed with my memories of Albania, provides a strong imagery for my own internal voyage, my viaje interior. Like the wise virgins who needed to make sure they had enough oil for their lamps to last till the bridegroom arrived, we must work now, in the autumn, to prepare our hearts and order our lives so that we too will be ready for Him.

I'll continue to blog my journey over these next few weeks, but if you wish to join us you can use this link.You can share in the reflections by recording your comments, if you wish, or just slip in & out anonymously and unnoticed. Either way you'd be very welcome.

Asalam Alayakom (Peace be with you)

Read more!

Being in Unity

As someone who was at the forefront of the ecumenical movement in New Zealand for almost 20 years, one of my guiding scripture was Psalm 133 in which the Psalmist clearly says that God's blessing of eternal life is for those who dwell in unity.

This year. as part of my own personal pilgrimage, I am making an on-line inter-faith journey through the month of Ramadan. It's an informal format, responsibility for providing the reflective input lies with fellow blogger Yosra and these reflections, along with remarks and comments from readers, like myself, create a virtual support group format.

But what, you might well ask, would a Christian have in common with a Muslim?

Well, apart from cultural differences, quite a lot actually. Obviously our understanding of the Trinity and therefore the Divinity of Jesus are areas where we differ but hay, Judaism shares those same concerns about us too, and many Christians would identify quite strongly with Israel.

Otherwise all three monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism & Islam) would see them selves in unity on all other important issues and this is supported by ongoing dialogue at the highest level.

That is, we all believe in the one God and we all share the same (Hebrew) Scriptures.

But more importantly, at grass roots level, we all love God and want to deepen our relationship with Him and with one another.

. . . . and that's a lot to share in common.

Read more!

Building a new identity

For many years I has a poster on my study wall. It showed a rag doll caught between the huge wooden rollers of an old fashioned washing mangle Beneath it the caption read,

'The truth will set you free, but first, it will make you miserable!'

The image was a great sauce of consolation and hope to me as I struggled to get my life together back then and the rag doll and I shared many adventures over the years.

I'd all but forgotten her, and her depressingly jaundiced view of life, till today as I tried out day one of living outside my old identity. I knew she was right, and that truth was the one thing that would allow me to move on, but what is truth and do we really have to do the misery bit again?

Afraid so John . . . . .

Alright then, where do we start? What's here beneath the ego that I Can use? Let's see, hmmmm transparency, haven't seen that in a while . . . (last used 10 September 1992.)

OK, lets start rebuilding with that. At least we'll all be able to see what's going on then.

Read more!

Becoming who I already am

I closed my past posting by saying,

"Maybe the next big journey should be the one the Spanish call un Viaje Interior, a journey inside. The road least traveled, the spiritual voyage of faith we are invited to undertake each Lent that leads to the discovery of God within."


Well it's not lent, but it is Ramadan . . . so I decided to follow my own counsel. It was wonderful. Just me and God, then . . .

"To be what you want to be, you must give up being what you are.Yusef Islam (formaly Cat Stevens . . . .

"We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are," Max DePree.

And the words of Jesus, 'If you want to find your life, you must lose it.'

Party Pooppers!

So.

What do I want to be?

The words bounced like thunder around the mountains of my mind. Despite all the self awareness courses I had been on I had no idea, in that moment, what I wanted to be, or what I needed to stop being in order to become it. All I wanted was some warm fuzzy time with God. To give him the benefit of my undivided attention for a while. Is that too much to ask God?

Like it or not, my viaje interior has started to kick in - and I didn't like it.

Was there anything holding me back? I searched my mind. My first thought was of the memory of my youngest daughter who died of natural causes just 4 days before her 20th birthday. She is in my every thought, still, so was God going to ask me to leave her memory behind as I moved on?

I went to sleep heavy hearted.

Then out of the blue this morning He showed me a burning bush. He began to show me how, in returning to my old life here in NZ, I had tried to pick up the mantle of my old reputation - and this was chaining me to a past which, though very rewarding, was none the less, past.

To move on all I needed to stop being was 'Mr Got it all together'. Simple!

For the first time I felt myself peeping under the covers of my own ego

But now I'm 'Mr Got it all, but not sure how to put it together. Oh well, back to the viaje. Maybe I should throw in a little fasting this time, just to make sure!

Read more!