The seasons of Lent and Ramadan are upon us, overlapping this year as they occasionally do. Likely with some shared origins (Ramadan practices may have been influenced by Syrian Lenten practices of the 7th century), the two seasons have much in common.

Both seasons extend an invitation to participants to fast, setting aside specific foods in specific period, sometimes adapted or extended to setting aside other things in modern practice. Fasting is not meant to declare food or bodily needs to be evil, but does remind participants that consumption will not fully satisfy our deepest needs.

It also creates miniature experience of solidarity with those who experience hunger and poverty, and is paired in both traditions with the invitation to charitably supporting others, or, as I might adapt it slightly, participation in relationships of mutual care and support with those around us, including those experiencing inequity, that all might have needs met and dignity upheld.

Both traditions also emphasize repentance in this season, which can feel like a very religious term, but essentially can be boiled down to turning away from those things that enslave, entrap, dehumanize etc. ourselves and other people. So these seasons call participants to self-examination and rooting out behaviors that harm and oppress ourselves and others. In religious traditions, that additionally is understood to address harms in the relationship with God, but even secular folks might adopt and benefit from a practice of self-examination.

In a culture dominated by capitalism and consumption, we are soaked in messages that consumption will satisfy us, that purchasing more will bring us happiness, status, etc. Seasons like Lent and Ramadan give a challenge to examine the truth of these claims, to examine the impacts our habits of addictive consumption have on ourselves, and to examine the systemic impacts they have on others. Lent particularly, through its initial day of Ash Wednesday, reminds us of the fleeting nature of life and therefore the value of every breath, life, and moment; our essential nature as dust that will return to the earth; and the emptiness of promises of this world of consumption that imply we can escape or bypass that reality but will themselves return eventually to dust.

Does our consumption, purchasing, binging, streaming, etc. satisfy us? Does it truly give us rest and joy? In what ways do our habits rob us of the very rest we seek to find through them?

Who else is impacted by these practices? Whether our own relationships, or those (human or otherwise) impacted by production processes, where does our consumption do harm?

In what ways does our consumption numb us to the realities of a broken world and keep us content amidst a status quo in conflict with our core values?

How might setting aside some element of our consumption make space through time, resources, and/or attention for deeper interdependent life with our neighbors?

Might we also find more rest and joy through practice of simplicity, finding and breaking the chains consumption has quietly placed in our lives?

And while we won’t solve the systemic injustices of capitalist production structures with such small individual changes, it is often not finding a more “green” or “ethical” item to buy that is the fundamental issue our collective relationship to world systems of oppression, but rather examination and reshaping of how much we really need to be consuming in the first place.

The overlap of followers of Jesus and Muhammad reflecting on and practicing these similar questions and counter-rhythms in this season also highlights the value of finding and making common cause with whatever allies we can, wherever we can, practicing solidarity towards love of our neighbors, even if our precise understandings of why we do what we are doing may differ.

May we find freedom in a second look at the hollowness of consumption’s contentment, and in taking steps towards simplicity that let its velvet-coated chains fall away.

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