The Light Between
On Eid, faith and the echo you find on the other side
Every week during Ramadan, one of Yas’s uncles showed up at our door with dinner.
The two of them took turns, actually, showing up with containers of warm food, carefully packed... biryani and pakoras and chicken roast and kebabs and whatever else had been made that day, enough for all of us. We weren’t fasting, neither of us is religious in that way, and nobody asked us to be. They just included us anyway, because that’s who they are. I would unpack everything, arrange it on a plate, and send a picture as a thank-you, and every single time I felt the same thing settle somewhere deep... we were taken care of. We were part of something I hadn’t expected to be.
I grew up in Blythewood, South Carolina, which is about as far from Ramadan or really any other religion beyond good ole’ Southern Baptist Christianity as a person can get. The world I was raised in was a particular shade of…Black and white. Baptist and Methodist, Catholic and Lutheran, sweet tea and Sunday lunch after church. That was the whole map. I didn’t actually know a single Muslim person growing up. I didn’t know anything about Islam at all, really, until September 11th, 2001, my freshman year of college, when I learned about an entire religion and its people through the worst possible lens, the way so many Americans did.
I look back on that time, and I’m incredibly thankful to have been in a writing class with a particularly jovial and poignant Muslim boy named Mohammed. It was his writings about his childhood and upbringing in Jordan, his stories of his family and history that really helped filter out the barrage of anti-muslim rhetoric coming from the media and surrounding our world at that time. It took years of real exposure and a genuine curiosity about people different from me to unlearn all that had been planted.
College cracked me open the way it’s supposed to...suddenly there were people from everywhere, believing different things, living entirely different lives, and I remember the specific liberating feeling of realizing the world was so much bigger and more full than the one I knew. That there were a hundred ways to love God, or the universe, or whatever you want to call the thing bigger than yourself, and most of them looked remarkably similar from the inside. Community. Service. Gratitude. Feeding people. Showing up for each other. The details were different, but the heartbeat was the same.
My own relationship with Christianity had gotten complicated over the years…I was raised in a small Southern Baptist Church where my parents were Sunday School teachers, and even I was a leader in the youth group very early on. I was raised in a home where asking questions was encouraged, where my parents pushed us to do our own research and develop our own process of thinking before believing anything that was just “told” to us. Our pastor from Oklahoma didn’t particularly like me very much. I challenged him and his sermons on almost a weekly basis, asking him to show me and explain the context around the verses I believed he was cherry-picking to appease his own beliefs and biases. But that’s who I was. I always asked questions and challenged anything that didn’t sit right in my heart. And in my 20s, newly married and deeply entrenched in this cool, “counter-cultural” church in Charlotte…my faith was rocked by the infidelity of leadership, and I was left with wounds instead of healing. I watched people using faith as a tool to divide and exclude rather than gather and love, and then, very personally, years of infertility had tested everything I thought I believed about a God who had a plan. I didn’t leave faith so much as I left the institution of it, the performance of it, the version that had been handed to me by people who used it to feel superior rather than connected. What I found on the other side of all that was strange and true...the further I got from organized religion, the more I actually understood what it was always supposed to be about. Love…radical, inconvenient, show-up-at-your-door-with-food love.
Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, prayer, and community. For 30 days, observant Muslims fast from dawn to sunset, not eating or drinking during daylight hours...a practice of discipline and deep gratitude and solidarity with those who go hungry not by choice. Iftar is the meal that breaks the fast each evening. Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking the fast, is the culminating celebration on the other side of all of that...a day of joy, of dressing in your finest, gathering with family, giving to those in need, and eating together with full hearts and full tables.
Ramadan also falls this year right alongside Lent, the Christian season of reflection and fasting that leads to Easter. And Passover begins just days later, the Jewish celebration of liberation and renewal. All of us, across different faiths, sitting with the same questions at the same time...what are we grateful for, what are we willing to sacrifice, what does it mean to be free, and how we take care of each other, how we love those different from ourselves, how we show up for the least of these. The calendar keeps trying to show and tell us something we keep refusing to hear.
Yas is not a deeply religious person. He spent a lot of his adult life at a distance from his faith and his culture, the way a lot of second-generation kids do when they’re trying to figure out where they fit in a world that doesn’t always make room for the in-between. But when we started planning our wedding, something shifted in him. He wanted to honor it. He wanted to claim it. We did a full desi wedding celebration, and his Uncle Barry stood up and offered prayers and words from the Quran, and my dad stood up and offered Christian prayers alongside his own words, and the room held all of it without flinching. I stood there between these two men, these two prayers, these two traditions reaching toward the same place, and I thought...this is exactly what it was always supposed to look like. This is the whole point.
I think watching Millie and me fall in love with his family and his culture for the first time has given something back to Yas. There is a real joy in seeing something you grew up taking for granted through the eyes of someone, an outsider, experiencing it fresh. He comes alive at these gatherings in a way that makes me smile every time. It’s like he remembers something he had set down a long time ago and willingly picked it back up.
Last year was my first Eid dinner with his family. I walked in nervous and walked out with henna drying on my hand, Amelia having won the games, leftovers packed up for the next day, and a feeling in my chest that I had been welcomed somewhere I didn’t know I had been missing. This year, I walked in as his wife, as if I belonged, a different thing entirely, and I was so ready for it.
His family is big and warm and loud in the best way, and the food is outrageously delicious...biryani that perfumes the whole house from the moment you walk in the door, chicken roast, dal, pakoras, kebabs, and then the desserts that just keep appearing from somewhere, tray after tray, sweet and cardamom-spiced and gone before you can go back for more. The women are dressed beautifully in their finest shalwar. The kids run the whole house. The elders hold court and everyone goes to them first to offer Eid Mubarak before anything else. It feels, honestly, a lot like every big Southern family gathering I grew up going to...just with different spices, kaftans instead of muumuus, and a different (but same) kind of prayer before the meal.
The thing nobody tells you when you grow up in a small world…when you finally step outside of it, you don’t find as much difference as you find echo. You see and feel the same impulse to gather…the same need to feed everyone who walks through the door…the same desire to mark the sacred moments with the people you love, to slow down once a year and say we made it, we are grateful, we are here together.
Amelia was nervous last year. She watched everything carefully the way she always does, taking it all in before deciding how she felt about it. By the end of the night she had won the kids’ games, had henna drying on her hands, and was asking when we could come back.
She is ten years old and already understands, even if she doesn’t have words for it yet, that there is more than one way to belong somewhere. That love looks different in different houses, gets cooked in different kitchens, and gets prayed in different languages and it is all, underneath, the same thing. Nobody told her one way was right and the others were wrong. She just gets to walk in, be welcomed, and let it land inside her.
I think about the girl I was at her age in Blythewood, with my one small map of the world, and I feel nothing but gratitude that she gets a bigger one. That Eid and Ramadan and Iftar and biryani and pakoras and henna and those prayers will be woven into the story she tells about her childhood, sitting right alongside the church potlucks and Nanny Sis’s Christmas candy, moments around the pool with Nonni and Poppi, beach trips with her cousins in Wilmington, and Sunday mornings in South Carolina.
At a time when the loudest voices keep insisting we are too different, that we should fear what we don’t understand, that we need revenge for past hurts that aren’t even ours, that there isn’t enough room at the table for all of us...I keep coming back to two uncles taking turns showing up at my door every week with warm food. No agenda…no conditions. Just here, eat, you’re family.
And that’s it, that’s the whole argument.
Eid Mubarak to everyone celebrating this Sunday...may your table be full, your heart be full, and the light find you wherever you are. And to those finishing out Lent and heading into Easter, and to those gathering for Passover in the days ahead...the same wish, same light, the same table.
We are all, this week, reaching toward the same thing.
Love and light…kindness and understanding…actual belonging.